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Opinion: Britain of 2022 is breathing a lot of 1979 air

Editor’s Note: Rosa Prince is editor of the magazine The House. She is a former assistant political editor at The Daily Telegraph and author of the books “Theresa May: The Enigmatic Prime Minister” and “Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup” very unlikely). The opinions expressed in this text are solely those of the author.

If the never-ending campaign to elect a new British prime minister this UK summer sometimes seems haunted by one of the most influential figures to hold the office, Margaret Thatcher, the specter is less Macbeth’s Banquo and more Casper the Friendly Ghost. .

Both candidates in the running to succeed Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party and, by default, become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, tried to embrace the Iron Lady.

Former Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak claimed that the woman they hope to follow to 10 Downing Street would have favored their receipts for the country (surely now she could not contradict them, as he died in 2013).

On Monday (5), Truss was declared the winner; she becomes leader of the Conservative Party instantly, but must wait another day to be taken to kiss the queen’s hands at the monarch’s summer residence in Balmoral, Scotland, before officially becoming prime minister.

In 2022, it’s as if the country itself is transforming into a shape Thatcher would recognize. The supporting characters are all playing their parts: union leaders souring industrial relations, Russia sowing discord, and inflation rising to a degree not seen since the 1970s.

There’s no denying that the new prime minister inherits a set of political circumstances more similar to those at play when Thatcher first took office in 1979 than anyone else who entered No. 10 in subsequent years.

Of the two candidates, it was Truss who embraced Thatcher most strongly. During her 12 months as Secretary of Foreign Affairs, she flooded social media with much-mocked images in which she mimicked Thatcher’s style, striking an almost identical pose in an imposing fur hat and wearing her famous lace blouses.

This affinity with the UK’s first prime minister means that, as she prepares to be crowned the third, it’s not trivial to draw comparisons between the pair, as it was with the second, Theresa May, who has always called this analysis “lazy”. .

And so two questions naturally arise: once in office, will Truss really seek to introduce Thatcherism Part Two? And if so, to what extent will revenue distributed over four decades succeed in solving the problems, however similar, of 2022?

The second question may require several economics degrees and a crystal ball to resolve; but there are too many clues in Truss’ past and career so far to try first.

Born in July 1975 in Oxford to a math professor and a nurse, like Thatcher, Truss was an original thinker from a young age, but unlike her heroine, she did not follow her parents’ policy.

Both senior Trusses were on the far left of the spectrum, and her mother Priscilla once took her to a protest march on Greenham Common in the English countryside, where Thatcher controversially gave her friend US President Ronald Reagan permission to keep American nuclear weapons.

Truss said that while her mother would likely vote for her now, she would need to work hard to gain the support of her father, John.

Thatcher learned the values ​​of thrift, self-reliance, and living within her means from her father, a grocer and alderman. Truss came to value such attributes in a more devious way.

At Thatcher’s alma mater at Oxford, where she studied philosophy, politics, and economics (Thatcher earned a more practical chemistry degree), Truss was president of the university’s Liberal Democrat club, a party that was and still is at the soft center of politics.

This meant that by the mid-1990s Truss was adopting policies that would have made Thatcher cringe, including legalizing cannabis and abolishing the monarchy.

But shortly after graduating, while working as an accountant for oil giant Shell, Truss moved to the right, meeting her husband, Hugh O’Leary, at a conservative conference. The couple had two daughters.

Truss entered Parliament a few years later in the wake of a very un-Thatcherite scandal: an affair with a Conservative MP that led her local Conservative association to consider dropping her as a candidate, claiming that she had not consulted with the association about the relationship during the selection. (She later apologized to the association for the affair, saying it was a “mistake” and “water under the bridge.”)

Like Thatcher, Truss saw fit to support British membership of the European Union until consensus changed and she did not.

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Her career survived, as did her marriage, and she made steady progress through the ranks.

Like Thatcher, Truss saw fit to support British membership of the European Union until consensus changed and she did not. Both campaigned on the “Remain” side of a referendum, Thatcher in 1975 and Truss in 2016, only to emerge as fervent Europhobes.

Unlike Thatcher, Truss was not a leader in her conversion to Euroscepticism, moving long after colleagues like Boris Johnson and former Conservative leadership candidate Michael Gove made the leap, but perhaps it was a similar journey: she saw the EU in action and felt it was no longer a good fit for modern Britain.

In Johnson’s Cabinet and later as a candidate for leadership, Truss raised eyebrows with her now decidedly Thatcherite conviction that the solution to the country’s economic problems was not handouts but tax cuts – letting the public keep more of their own money and trusting them to know what best to do with it.

She became an ideologue after such things went out of fashion – a staunch politician when everyone around was now pragmatic.

But what is perhaps most striking is not so much the similarity of Truss and Thatcher’s views – the medicine they believe a sick Britain must swallow to heal public finances (and only time will tell if the patient’s recovery is swift. ) – but the determination with which they defend these points of view.

That Truss can and has changed her mind is clear. But, like Thatcher, she does it on her own terms: she won’t be intimidated, resisting all pressures to promise to spend the public’s money on the rising cost of living compounded by the energy crisis.

Like the ghost of Thatcher’s past, it’s clear that this lady too it’s not turns.

Source: CNN Brasil

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