Who inspired Thatcher’s most damaging remark? Tony Blair’s favourite guru

Few phrases in modern political history have done more damage than Margaret Thatcher’s notorious remark that ‘there is no such thing as society’. It was made to the magazine Woman’s Own in 1987, when Thatcher was at the height of her power. It has been used against her ever since. The former prime minister’s political opponents have manipulated the phrase to demonstrate that she was heartless, lacking in compassion and believed in an atomistic Hobbesian world where each individual looked only after himself.

To give a recent example, here is Tony Blair setting out his new ‘vision for Britain’ in the spring of this year: ‘We are emerging from a long period in which Tory values held sway: elitism, selfish individualism; the belief that there is no such thing as society and its international equivalent – insularity and isolationism.’ Even 15 years on, Margaret Thatcher’s words are being twisted to portray the Conservative party as callow and selfish.