Conservatism’s reinvention: Thatcher’s war on consensus

Thatcherism's lessons on building a conservative political coalition

Previous instalments:

1. How can a Conservative coalition be built?

2. Theories of Hegemony: How to build and hold a political (not just parliamentary) majority

3. Britain’s crisis years: decline, disorder, and the making of Thatcher’s moment

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By the mid-1970s, the Conservative Party looked like a wreck. Edward Heath had gambled everything on a question (“Who governs Britain?”) and lost. He had marched into a confrontation with the miners, imposed the famous three-day week, and dared the country to choose between union militancy and elected government. Voters chose neither. Labour returned to power, Heath was humiliated, and the Conservatives, the so-called natural party of government, were left to stew in opposition.

It was not just a defeat, but an identity crisis. For decades the Tory recipe had been one of moderation and pragmatism. They had embraced the welfare state after 1945, accepted nationalisation, managed a mixed economy. They were not ideologues but managers, caretakers of a consensus. That consensus now lay in ruins. Inflation soared, strikes multiplied, Britain went cap in hand to the IMF. Pragmatism looked like drift, compromise looked like weakness, moderation looked like surrender.

The question Conservatives now had to answer was brutal in its simplicity: what did it mean to be Conservative in a country that no longer seemed governable?

The Heath years embodied that confusion. Heath himself was not devoid of ambition. He took Britain into the European Economic Community in 1973, convinced that European markets offered the only route to renewal. He had dreams of modernisation. But his government was consumed by industrial disputes. The miners defeated him twice, in 1972 and again in 1974, their strikes forcing humiliating retreats. Britain endured blackouts, a three-day working week, power cuts in homes and factories. Heath responded with bluster — “Who governs Britain?” — but the answer that came back was not him, not the Tories, and perhaps not anyone at all.

It left the Conservative Party stranded. They had hitched themselves to a post-war settlement that no longer worked, but they had no alternative. The Labour Party at least had unions and socialism to fall back on, however battered. The Conservatives had managerialism. And managerialism had just failed.

Into this vacuum stepped Margaret Thatcher.