David Lammy’s Thatcher u-turn

As Labour prepares for power, the party’s leading lights are busy u-turning: not least on their views on Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady is Labour’s inspiration du jour, much to the anger of the party’s lefties. First, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones claimed that Thatcher oversaw a decade of ‘national renewal’. Then shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves chose to pitch herself as a modern day Iron Lady at Tuesday’s Mais lecture. And now shadow foreign secretary David Lammy has been busy singing Thatcher’s praises, with Lammy telling Politico that the Tory leader was a ‘visionary leader for the UK’.

But Lammy has not always been keen to talk up the virtues of Mrs T. In fact, many of his previous social media interactions would suggest quite the opposite. In 2019, the Labour MP for Tottenham slammed the first female prime minister, tweeting: ‘Northern industrial areas were decimated by Thatcher.’