Liz Truss is trying to channel Margaret Thatcher. Why it’s not working.

And new Prime Minister Liz Truss is trying to pattern herself on a political figure who rose to prominence during that period: Margaret Thatcher. Like Thatcher in 1979, Truss is claiming that Britain is in decline and that she is the answer. She has scapegoated global conditions, including the covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as domestic opponents. During her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham on Oct. 5, Truss acknowledged, “The status quo is not an option.” She asserted, then, that her party was “the only party with a clear plan to get Britain moving” and “the determination to deliver.”

Yet while Thatcher spun a dominant narrative of decline that resonated with the public and enabled her to prescribe a path to renewal, Truss’s speech rang hollow.

Despite the two confronting a similar period of domestic turmoil and torment, Truss’s position is fundamentally different from Thatcher’s because her party has been in power for the last 12 years, and she does not credibly represent a new kind of politics like Thatcher did.

The 1979 election was dominated by claims of British decline. The preface of the Conservative Manifesto — laying out the party’s agenda of law and order and austerity to combat inflation — proclaimed that there was a “feeling of helplessness” because many Britons saw their country as “a once great nation that has somehow fallen behind” and worried “that it is too late now to turn things round.” Thatcher herself went on the BBC and declared, “I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t.”

As historian Guy Ortolano argues, Thatcher weaponized public fears about decline during the campaign and into her early years as prime minister. She successfully blamed the incumbent Labour Party for Britain’s problems and took umbrage at Labour’s attempts to fault world conditions for British decline.

Thatcher’s effort to harness fears about decline also worked because she was an outsider, both with respect to her relationship with the Conservative Party, as well as her sex and class. She was from Britain’s middle class — a “grocer’s daughter”— and was a woman in a male-dominated world of British politics (when she was first elected, she was one of only 25 women in a Parliament of 630). In 1975, she had become the leader of the Conservative Party by toppling Edward Heath thanks to support from backbenchers — and over the opposition of senior party figures and the establishment Conservative press. Many in her own party held Thatcher in disdain, because they saw her style as abrasive, no doubt influenced by sexist and classist tropes.

Being a genuine outsider enabled Thatcher to campaign against the ruling establishment across the political spectrum. She aimed her declinist rhetoric at status quo politics — both the Labour Party’s brand and her party’s version — and blamed the establishment in both parties for British decline. This claim resonated with the British public because it rang true.

Thatcher also cultivated an image that she was a new kind of leader, someone who was ready to make major changes. She was not interested in tinkering at the margins of policy. She continually stressed that, “however difficult the road might be and however long it took us to reach our destination, we intended to achieve a fundamental change of direction. We stood for a new beginning, not more of the same,” she wrote in her memoir “The Downing Street Years.” She pushed for dismantling the welfare state through tax cuts and a more militant approach to the trade unions.

Thatcher understood British decline not only in economic terms, but in terms of morality and values as well. She stressed Britain’s drift from good, old-fashioned, Victorian values as well as the moral decay evidenced by riots, strikes and crime in late 1970s Britain. Individual responsibility was key for Thatcher. “At the heart of a new mood in the nation must be a recovery of our self-confidence and our self-respect,” Thatcher argued, claiming that “Nothing is beyond us. Decline is [not] inevitable. … The foundation of this new confidence has to be individual responsibility.”

For Thatcher and her “new right” political movement, convincing Britons that the nation was in decline and needed their new prescriptions became the key message — indeed, core to their political identity. As Thatcher remarked in her memoir: “Everything we wished to do had to fit into the overall strategy of reversing Britain’s economic decline, for without an end to that decline there was no hope of success for our other objectives.”

Thatcher’s outsider status and her call for major changes stand in contrast to Truss’s situation. The Conservative Party has controlled the British government for 12 years. Truss’s ideas don’t represent something new or fresh. Instead, her polices represent a continuation of past Conservative policy, from foreign affairs to health and social care to the major tax cut she has proposed. Truss has not, yet, offered any clear vision distinct from her Tory predecessors. Because her party has been in power so long, and she has been a part of the government, Truss also can’t easily cast both Labour and Conservative policy as complicit in British decline.

Despite her brief tenure, Truss is now very unpopular — more unpopular than Boris Johnson ever was among the British public. Even a majority of British Conservatives now have a negative opinion of Truss, indicating that her prescriptions feel stale after so many years of Conservative dominance.

Under these circumstances, Truss’s declinist rhetoric rings hollow. Even Britons convinced their nation is in decline find it hard to see Truss, with her now-standard Conservative prescriptions, as the one who can reverse this trend.

Thatcher was, infamously, a “lady not for turning.” Truss, on the other hand, seems directionless in her attempts to generate a credible narrative of British decline and renewal.