Kemi Badenoch has placed Margaret Thatcher at the centre of the Conservative party's intellectual renewal, publishing a policy framework that repeatedly invokes the former prime minister's 1976 statement, The Right Approach. The document, titled The Right Way, sets out a familiar economic creed: that only private enterprise creates wealth, that taxes, regulation and public spending can obstruct growth and competition, and that markets make the country stronger. The party leader's argument is that the Conservatives lost their way during 14 years in office by abandoning these principles.
That framing was reinforced by the shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, who made clear that Conservative failures in government were the result of the party straying from Thatcherite doctrine. The claim invites scrutiny, however, because the record of those years can be read in the opposite direction. On energy security in particular, the argument that the party erred by departing from market-first thinking runs up against the evidence that it followed that thinking closely — and paid a price.
The Rough gasfield, a depleted North Sea facility that once provided around 70 per cent of the UK's gas-storage capacity, was judged uneconomic by its private owner. In 2017, a Conservative government accepted that judgment and allowed the site to close, on the assumption that international markets could supply the UK with adequate energy security. That assumption was tested when Russia invaded Ukraine, sending fossil fuel prices sharply higher. Britain, as a net energy importer with heavy dependence on gas, was particularly exposed. Ministers were forced to bring Rough back into operation in 2022.
Badenoch has described the closure as a case of «false economies». But the episode points to a different diagnosis. The problem was not that the party had drifted from its principles, but that it placed private profitability ahead of the country's needs. The decision to let a strategic storage asset close was not a departure from market-first economics; it was an application of it. The consequence was a period in which the UK's energy resilience was thinner than it should have been, and the state had to intervene to restore capacity it had previously accepted the loss of.
The broader question raised by the new framework is whether a return to the language of 1976 offers a credible answer to the problems Britain faces now. The country's needs, as the energy example illustrates, include investment and resilience — the capacity to withstand shocks that markets alone do not price. That is not an argument against private enterprise, but it is an argument against treating market outcomes as automatically equivalent to the national interest.
Badenoch's document is intended to draw a clear line between her leadership and the record of previous Conservative governments. Yet the Rough case suggests the line is harder to draw than the rhetoric implies. The failures of the 2014-2024 period were not simply the result of abandoning Thatcherite principles. In important respects, they were the result of applying them. A framework that does not reckon with that possibility risks repeating the same mistakes under a new label.
The political stakes are considerable. The Conservatives are seeking to rebuild credibility on economic management after a period in which they lost the argument with voters. Badenoch's answer is to return to first principles as she defines them. Her opponents will argue that the country needs something different: a strategy that combines private dynamism with public investment in the infrastructure and security that markets underprovide. The energy record is likely to remain central to that dispute.