The Tory modernisers are Margaret Thatcher’s true heirs

Margaret Thatcher’s death has inevitably prompted intense reflection among Tories about what lessons the party should learn from her time in office. ‘We must finish the job’ is the refrain on the lips of Thatcherite ministers, and there are more of those today than there were a year ago. The experience of office has had a radicalising effect on the Cameroons. To be sure, today’s circumstances are not the same as those of 1979 or ’89. Her exact policy prescription is not what is required. This is something that Thatcher, a politician who relished fresh thinking, would have appreciated. But what the party does need is the spirit of Thatcherism, that understanding of what a centre-right party should be in the modern age.

Thatcher understood that it was not enough for a Conservative government to  seek to conserve things. In a world in which change is inevitable and the Labour party, the academic establishment and the self-appointed representatives of civil society are all doing their best to move the country to the left, Conservatives have to do more than to try and hold the line.