Keir Starmer was right to invoke Thatcher – but he must take care not to copy the Iron Lady too closely

Sir Keir Starmer has taken his overhaul of the Labour Party a step further by heaping praise on Margaret Thatcher. Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, he said she achieved “meaningful change” and “sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”. Later he told the BBC she had a “driving sense of purpose”, but stressed his comments did not mean he agreed with what she did.

If the Labour leader intended to rile the Conservatives, and left-wingers in his own party, he succeeded on both fronts. Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, accused him of “trying to ride on the coattails” of Baroness Thatcher’s success. Momentum, the left-wing pressure group, declared: “Margaret Thatcher laid waste to working-class communities, privatised our public services, and set in train the destruction of the post-war settlement founded by Labour. Starmer’s praise of her isn’t smart politics. It’s a shift to the right, and a failure of Labour values.”

We disagree. Some in Sir Keir’s party do not like to see him following Tony Blair’s playbook, and this is another example of it. When Lady Thatcher died in 2013, Sir Tony described her as “a towering political figure”, adding: “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done, rather than reverse them.”

The Blair manual won three general elections and Sir Keir must be doing something right: despite Rishi Sunak’s repeated attempts to fight back, Labour has maintained a 20-point lead in the opinion polls. True, Labour has been better at playing defensively and repelling Tory brickbats than going on the attack with a positive appeal. But Sir Keir is the equivalent of 2-0 up, and so his tactics are understandable.

He recognises the game still has a long way to run. In a speech to a Resolution Foundation conference on the economy today (Monday), he will acknowledge an incoming Labour government would face “huge constraints” because of the Tories’ legacy on “inflation, debt, taxes”, and promise he would not “quickly turn on the spending taps”. Insisting Labour would make “different choices”, he will argue his government would square the circle by making economic growth its “obsession”. While Labour’s plans to increase housebuilding would help, Sir Keir still has to show voters precisely how his party would boost growth.

Clearly Starmer is taking his lead from Saatchi & Saatchi, the ad agency which helped bring Thatcher to power. Last month its boss Richard Huntington wrote in The Independent how the Tories were no longer working, and that change was needed. It was a barometer moment in politics – Rachel Reeves compared it to the ravens leaving the Tower of London.

To see Labour adopt part of the Thatcher armoury like this is somewhat surreal, but they know it was the Iron Lady’s potent projection which propelled her to victory, and kept her on the side of enterprise and aspiration.

Both his reassurance on spending and his praise for Lady Thatcher are aimed squarely at a critical group of voters Mr Sunak is also wooing: about one in four people who supported the Tories in 2019 do not know how they will vote next time. The size of this group gives Tory strategists a ray of hope when they desperately need it. According to pollsters YouGov, many of these voters are in the blue wall in the south. Nationally, 12 per cent of 2019 Tory supporters would now vote Labour – less than the 16 per cent Sir Tony achieved in his 1997 landslide.

A 1997-style swing would give Labour an overall majority of just one at the next election; Sir Keir and his party, while doing well in the red wall in the north and Midlands, have more work to do in the blue wall.

True, there are risks for Sir Keir in provoking his internal critics. As prime minister, he would need the support of his party generally and his MPs in particular. The backlash against his refusal to call for a permanent ceasefire in Israel and Gaza, which extended from the usual hard-left suspects to the soft left, showed he cannot take the parliamentary Labour Party for granted. Yet his critics would be wise to remember he still has an election to win; without that, Labour’s intense debate about the Middle East is purely academic. Sir Keir’s pledge of “iron-clad fiscal rules” and his words about the Iron Lady are designed to help ensure that victory.

So his latest piece of positioning is sensible politics. All the same, Labour should not get too carried away in its apparent love affair with Lady Thatcher. While much of her harsh medicine was necessary, a Starmer government would need to show more compassion than she did. To deliver the change the public had voted for, it would somehow have to find a way to revive our ailing public services. Labour would need to govern with its heart, as well as its head.