OPINION
Conor Burns developed a friendship with Mrs T later in life (Image: Conor Burns)
One Sunday evening in the last years of her life I was sitting with Lady Thatcher in her living room in Chester Square.
Looking around the room I pointed to he silver bowl on the mantlepiece given to her by the 1922 Committee on the 10th anniversary of her becoming Prime Minister and the watercolour of Downing Street by Nicholas Ridley gifted by the cabinet on the same occasion.
I asked her if you ever sat back and thought ‘not bad. Not bad at all.’
She replied with characteristic force, “No because as my father used to say its not what you have done it is what you are still to do.”
Margaret Thatcher always looked forward. She wanted to change the future not sentimentalise the past. What made her different and special was the profound sense that she was of her time.
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Mrs Thatcher became Tory leader 50 years ago today (Image: Getty)
She was radical and contemporary. Yes, her values and principles were, and are, timeless but she applied them to the challenges of the day.
50 years on from her becoming Leader of the Conservative Party I think two things would perhaps confuse her. Firstly that 50 years on and 35 since she left Number 10 the Conservative Party is still looking back to her.
I never once heard her reference her 50 year predecessor Stanley Baldwin once.
Secondly, having fought and won so many intellectual battles I think she would have been bewildered that so many supposed Conservatives both admired and emulated a leader, Tony Blair, who only came to power by accepting the central tenants of her time in power and sought to distance her.
So, what can we learn from her today?
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Conor Burns says Mrs Thatcher ‘admired’ Nigel Farage (Image: Getty)
Well, she rejected consensus and tackled big issues from first principles. She took over a country that was overmanned, overtaxed, over regulated, under defended and badly educated. She set out to fix these.
She thought in solutions and years not news cycles and opinion polls.
She was honest and direct with the public and candid about the choices involved in tax and spending.
And she led her party. Mind you in those days there were fewer people around for whom the phrase ‘One Nation’ meant something different than support for whatever one nation meant harm to Britain.
Today she would see public sector inefficiency, far too high tax, out of control welfare and entitlements and a choking of enterprise.
She would worry about the fragility of our defences and be mortified at the abuses of the Human Rights Act. She would have been shocked at the woke mess that are out police forces and especially the Met.
She would abhor the way we have been used as an international doss house for so many who have no legitimate claim to our hospitality and many more who wish us harm.
She would, I am certain, be resolving to do something about it.
On the Reform/Conservative divide I know she admired . I am certain she would also admire Kemi Badenoch and her engineer’s mind so much like her own of the chemist.
She would want above all to remove this Government. And I suspect she would hold to the view she held in life that only the Conservative Party was a big enough vehicle to achieve that.
Although she would certainly want to rid it of the current and former MPs who are LibDems in Conservative clothing.
Perhaps above all she would remind us that as she said that in politics there are no final victories and it is up to each generation to make the case for Conservativism anew.
And although she would have been too modest to say it perhaps her greatest gift we have is the thing that she did not – the courage of her example.
On her 50th anniversary, she would tell us to get to work and to look forward not back.