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Politics Home Article | Thatcher “Would Have Hated” Farage, Says Lord Heseltine
Lord Heseltine said Nigel Farage was ‘Donald Trump’s vicar in Britain’ (Photograph by Tom Pilston)
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Margaret Thatcher “would have hated” Nigel Farage and “would have had nothing to do with him” if she were alive today, her former cabinet colleague Lord Heseltine has claimed.
In an interview with The House magazine, the former minister in Thatcher’s Conservative government suggested that the late prime minister would have seen through the Reform UK leader’s “opportunism” and “prejudices”.
Farage, by contrast, said last year that there “isn’t any doubt” that Reform would have appealed to Thatcher. Following her death in 2013, he also declared that he was the only politician “keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive”.
The Reform leader, who was a Tory member in the 1980s while working as a commodities trader in the City, has said that Thatcher was a “great inspiration” to him.
But asked what opinion Thatcher might have had of Farage and his political project today, Heseltine told The House: “She’d have hated him.
“Nigel Farage will assimilate himself with anyone he thinks has got a resonance in public opinion. He is Donald Trump’s vicar in Britain…
“But the origins of ‘Nigel Trump’ are a guy with a beer tankard and a fag. Then the farmers get into trouble, and he turns up looking like a farmer – and this is all a communications process. Successful, but based on opportunism, based on a degree of prejudices which I find abhorrent. She would have had nothing to do with him.”
Speaking to The Spectator last year, Farage claimed that “it was made very clear” to him that Thatcher had voted for his previous political outfit, UKIP, in the 1999 European elections.
In a 2024 interview with The Telegraph, the Reform leader argued that both he and Thatcher were conviction politicians, praising her as “a fighter who stood up and fought for issues, not because focus groups told her she should, but because she believed it was the right direction to go in…
“So if there was a similarity, it’s being unafraid to fight for things that may not be trendy today but may well become so in the future.”
The House magazine’s full interview with Lord Heseltine will be published in print and online in June.
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