How can a Conservative coalition be built?
Learning the strategic lessons of Thatcherism.
How Thatcher Built Her Army Before the Battle
In British politics, the Conservative Party has a habit. When it loses power, it doesn’t just lick its wounds, it retreats into a period of self-examination. The party debates its values, dusts off old thinkers, and tries to decide what it really stands for before making its next move.
From Baldwin in the 1920s to Cameron in the 2000s, Conservatives have used time in opposition as a kind of ideological boot camp. But the most important Conservative comeback of the last century - Margaret Thatcher’s rise in the late 1970s - wasn’t just about getting the party’s internal philosophy in order.
The real lesson of Thatcherism is something else entirely: how to build a coalition of forces outside Parliament that could fight alongside the party, shape the political battlefield, and keep the government’s project alive long after the election was over.
In other words: Thatcher didn’t just win in the House of Commons. She won in the press, in think tanks, in grassroots activism, and even in the culture wars. And she had started assembling that army long before she became Prime Minister.
If you turned on the TV in the 1970s, Britain often looked like a country coming apart at the seams. News bulletins showed picket lines outside factories, mountains of rubbish in the streets during bin strikes, and, in the notorious “Winter of Discontent”, even reports of the dead going unburied. Economists coined the word stagflation to describe the toxic mix of high inflation and high unemployment.
It wasn’t just economics. The old moral order seemed to be fraying. “Permissive” social reforms in the 1960s (legalising abortion, easing divorce laws, decriminalising homosexuality) left traditionalists convinced Britain had lost its moral compass. Campaigners like Mary Whitehouse turned “cleaning up TV” into a moral crusade.
Meanwhile, Britain’s place in the world had shifted. The Empire was gone. The country was now a middling power in the shadow of the Cold War superpowers. For some, this was a quiet identity crisis: what did it mean to be British without an empire, without global dominance, and, increasingly, without control over our own economy in a globalising world?
The real lesson of Thatcherism is something else entirely: how to build a coalition of forces outside Parliament that could fight alongside the party.
A Political Opening
In politics, moments like this are dangerous for the party in power. The Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan struggled to respond to the crises, often relying on deals with powerful trade unions that only fuelled public frustration.
For the Conservatives, this was an opening. But there was a problem. The party itself had been part of the “post-war consensus”: a broad agreement between the main parties to maintain the welfare state, manage the economy through Keynesian policies, and keep nationalised industries in state hands. Many Conservatives had been as comfortable with state intervention as Labour ministers.
That consensus had kept the peace in British politics for three decades. But by the 1970s, it was fraying badly. Some on the Tory right thought it needed smashing entirely. The challenge was to unite a set of forces — inside and outside the party — that could do it.
Three Camps, One Goal
Outside the Conservative mainstream, three broad groups had been developing their own grievances with the post-war order:
The economic radicals: Free-market economists inspired by thinkers like Friedrich Hayek had been warning since the 1940s that state planning and high public spending would eventually lead to economic stagnation and loss of liberty. In Britain, think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs quietly produced a steady stream of arguments against the consensus.
The social conservatives: Campaigners who saw the “Permissive Society” as a moral decline. They believed the state was encouraging dependency and undermining family and community.
The nationalists: Figures like Enoch Powell, who fused anxieties about immigration and loss of sovereignty into a wider sense of national decline. They saw militant trade unions as a kind of “enemy within” — undermining the nation from the inside.
These groups didn’t agree on everything. A Hayek-reading free-marketeer might have been indifferent to Mary Whitehouse’s moral campaigns. A nationalist might not have cared about privatising industries. But they all agreed on one thing: the country was in deep trouble, and the blame lay with the overmighty state and the political consensus that kept it there.
Britain needed a decisive break from the post-war consensus, and Thatcher’s Conservatives had the plan, and the allies, to deliver it.
From Shared Anger to Shared Story
This is where the story turns from parallel grumbling to political strategy. Thatcher and her allies - most importantly the Conservative intellectual Keith Joseph - began to knit these grievances together into a single story about Britain.
The key was a simple, emotionally resonant idea: order. In the Thatcherite story, Britain’s economic problems, its moral drift, and its loss of national pride were all symptoms of the same disease: too much state control, too little individual responsibility.
For the free-marketeers, “order” meant the discipline of the market — freeing enterprise from bureaucratic meddling.
For social conservatives, it meant the moral order of strong families, law and order, and personal duty.
For nationalists, it meant the restoration of the nation’s authority — at home against unruly unions, and abroad on the world stage.
It was a masterstroke of political storytelling. Different audiences could hear the same word and picture their own preferred kind of order.
The Extra-Parliamentary Army
Crucially, this wasn’t just a matter of rewriting the Conservative manifesto. It meant building an infrastructure of support that reached far beyond the party.
Think tanks like the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Joseph and Thatcher) and the Adam Smith Institute became political R&D labs, producing detailed blueprints for privatisation and deregulation. Campaign groups like the Freedom Association fought public battles against trade union power. Sympathetic columnists in the press kept the “crisis” narrative alive. Even TV debates and moral campaigns became part of the same cultural struggle.
By the time Thatcher became leader in 1975, she wasn’t just heading a party — she was at the centre of a movement.
Winning Before the Election
This is the deeper lesson of Thatcherism. By the late 1970s, the ground had already shifted. The “Winter of Discontent” in 1978-79, with its strikes and shortages, seemed to prove the Thatcherite story right. The election campaign of 1979 was almost an afterthought. The argument had already been won in people’s minds: Britain needed a decisive break from the post-war consensus, and Thatcher’s Conservatives had the plan, and the allies, to deliver it.
Why This Matters Now
Chantal Mouffe, the political theorist, once suggested that anyone trying to build a “left populism” today should study Thatcher’s rise. Not because of her policies, but because of her method. She took disparate, sometimes conflicting forces, and turned them into a single political force capable of reshaping the country. She did it by linking their complaints into a unifying story, and by cultivating an extra-political coalition that could keep the pressure up once she was in power.
For anyone trying to change the direction of British politics now, in an era some call the “crisis of neoliberalism”, that lesson is as relevant as ever. The real question is: who will build the next coalition strong enough to change the story Britain tells about itself?
This series of essays is an attempt to examine in-depth the emergence of Thatcherism as a movement, less focussed on the ideological contents of the movement, and more on the strategic construction it involved. Doing so requires examining the political theory of hegemony as an intellectual tool for understanding how that strategic construction could take place.