When Liz Truss was asked at the very first Conservative leadership hustings in Leeds which of the party’s past prime ministers she most admired, she had a very definite answer: Margaret Thatcher.
As Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out just last week, her plans to increase the national debt in order to lower taxes “could not be further from Thatcher who…took the very unpopular decision to raise taxes in 1981 to manage deficit and inflation”.
Rather, the economics expert said, such a policy had “clear echoes of Ted Heath in 1973”.
Conservative MP Robert Jenrick expressed a similar concern. “It is antithesis of Thatcherism,” he said, “to be going around making unfunded tax pledges merely to win a leadership contest.”
At the risk of sounding crass, I can easily believe ‘this woman was PM ahead of her time, she’s my hero’ is as far as the inspiration could stretch.
Could be. Liz Truss said something similar, and she’s also very much on the “loose” side of things
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liz-truss-margaret-thatcher-similarities-b2159085.html