IT’S 50 YEARS since Margaret Thatcher was elected Tory leader. Ted Heath had lost two elections to Labour in February and October 1974 and was eventually forced to call a leadership election in February 1975. He lost in the first round of voting on February 4 to a right-wing outsider — Thatcher. In the second ballot she got a majority of all Tory MPs over four other middle-aged white men in suits and became Tory leader. Just over four years later in May 1979 she became prime minister.

The 50th anniversary has already been marked by a two-part recreation of an interview Brian Walden did with her in 1989. An opera written by social historian Dominic Sandbrook is due later this year.

Thatcher’s victory was unexpected, not least because she represented a rightward shift in Tory politics — even if anyone active in the early 1970s in the labour movement would have thought Heath with his hard line anti-union stance was quite right-wing enough.

While it’s difficult to find anything good to say about Thatcher, for historians, there is one reason to thank her. The online and free-to-access Thatcher Foundation site has a comprehensive listing of her speeches, meetings and some letters. She is probably the last PM to exist in a world before email or WhatsApp and to have kept records for posterity.

We know therefore that the US ambassador found her leadership victory to be surprising and noted that she would need to move to the left if she were ever to become prime minister.

Not on her site is Harold Macmillan’s view that Thatcher was “suburban,” a damning insult in Tory class politics.

While Thatcher was keen to play down her victory as gender based, the media was not. An ITN interview on the day of her leadership victory asked how she would manage the shopping and cooking. She responded that she did it at weekends and her (revolting) recipe for a dinner party starter can be found online.

It was the political project of Thatcherism that was developed in the four years between February 1975 and May 1979. It is one familiar to us now of transforming a market economy into a market society where profit came before people in every sphere. That meant wholesale privatisation of public services, the sell-off of council housing and continued attacks on trade union rights and organisation.

When New Labour came to office in 1979 it was not a framework that Tony Blair diverged from all that much. Indeed in the National Archives can be found memos from Peter Mandelson in 1997 arguing that parts of the Thatcher project were popular and Labour should do more around them.

The late theorist Stuart Hall labelled Thatcherism the “Great Moving Right Show” in Marxism Today. New Labour followed suit. Only later in 2012 did Hall tell the New Statesman that he had been misunderstood. He was not arguing that Blair needed to follow Labour rightwards. Rather his point was that Labour needed a similar project but on the left of politics. 

This echoes down to the present day with the politics such as they are of Starmerism. In terms of marking the 50th anniversary of Thatcher’s leadership election victory it also reminds us of Marx’s words that the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

For the working-class communities that Thatcher laid waste to and the skilled jobs and industries she destroyed, the 50th anniversary is an unpleasant reminder of what happens if the left fails.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian.