Boris Johnson has unleashed the ghost of Margaret Thatcher – and frightened off potential voters

Boris Johnson’s ill-judged remarks that Margaret Thatcher gave the fight against climate change “a big early start” by closing coal mines are a disaster for the prime minister.

It doesn’t matter if it was another of his half-joking but highly damaging comments that Dominic Cummings, formerly his closest adviser, now chronicles daily. Those few words will be what most Scots remember from his two-day visit to the country. They will also have been noticed in the north, Midlands and Wales, where pit closures are no laughing matter.

To make matters worse, Johnson stopped short of apologising, his official spokesman saying only that the prime minister “recognises the huge impact and pain closing coal mines had in communities across the UK”. He could instead have turned this story round by promising to learn lessons from the pit closures by protecting communities affected by the transition away from oil and gas to achieve “net zero”.

Johnson has form in causing offence like this: as editor of The Spectator magazine, he alienated people in Liverpool by running an editorial accusing the city of wallowing in “victim status” over the Hillsborough disaster. Also a junior Tory frontbencher at the time, Johnson went to the city to apologise for the article, though many Liverpudlians have not forgotten or forgiven.

Now he is prime minister, his latest bout of foot in mouth disease matters even more. The Tories’ sweeping gains in the north and Midlands at the 2019 general election were not all down to Brexit; Johnson was seen as “not a typical Tory” and viewed as his party’s antithesis to Margaret Thatcher. He finally made it possible for many working-class people to vote Tory for the first time.

Although Thatcher is revered by many in her party, she remains a hate figure in these regions because her harsh economic medicine resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. In the coalfields, Thatcherism is remembered not just for throwing miners on the scrapheap but destroying whole communities and the prospects of their children and grandchildren.

The perceived neglect of the left behind north and Midlands since the Thatcher era also contributed to Johnson’s 2019 demolition of Labour’s “red wall” because of his pledge to “level up” the poorest regions.

The words which caused Johnson’s latest sky-high reading on the gaffometer were factually wrong. Although Thatcher was ahead of the game on climate change, shutting the coal mines was no part of her strategy; she saw the miners as “the enemy within”. The former research chemist recognised the threat to the planet long before it became fashionable to do so. Her landmark speech at the United Nations in 1989 helped galvanise the green movement (although she later spoilt it by regretting that climate change “dogma” had swept through left-of-centre governing classes). Prophetically, she said in 1989: “It is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay. We shall only succeed in dealing with the problems through a vast international, co-operative effort.”

As Johnson knows all too well, the world is still squabbling over who should pay: an overdue $100bn-a-year transfer from rich to poor nations is a potential stumbling block at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow in November.

Coal was on Johnson’s mind because he is struggling to persuade the rest of the world to phase out the use of coal power, another headache in the run-up to the conference. As I wrote here last week, the prospects of agreement at the summit are not looking good, even though this year’s extreme weather events have reminded politicians just how vital progress is.

Johnson’s ill-judged remarks will play into the Scottish National Party’s hands and help their efforts to portray him and his party as out of touch. Ironically, his trip was designed to signal a softer approach on the question of Scottish independence than the Tories’ previous “muscular unionism”.

The new stance is supposed to be about not provoking the nationalists or picking fights with them – precisely what Johnson managed to do. As the SNP prepares to relaunch its campaign for independence next month, he will need to show much more discipline, subtlety and restraint if the “softly, softly” approach is to work.

The ghost of Thatcher will also return to haunt him this autumn when the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, conducts a government-wide spending review. It is bound to involve a squeeze in some areas of spending to allow the chancellor to put money into priority areas such as Covid recovery in health, social care, education, public transport and the courts and to meet the cost of “net zero”. And that’s before “levelling up”.

Treasury sources warn the settlement for some budgets will be “tough”. Johnson’s opponents will describe the savings as “Tory cuts” and portray him as a Thatcherite committed to the austerity he claims to have buried, risking another backlash from voters going beyond the red wall and Scotland.