QUENTIN LETTS: The sight of Maggie's old outfits at Tory conference is creepy. It's time for the party to end its obsession with her if it is to have any chance of a revival

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Before the Conservatives win any election they will need to chime with 21st-century Britain and its voters. To use a German word, they will need to find the zeitgeist.

And yet the first thing you see on arriving at the party's conference in Manchester this week is a reminder of the past: three outfits worn by Margaret Thatcher.

The exhibits, contained in a glass case, are not without interest. You can press your snout up close and admire the weave of a 1989 wool crepe suit in royal blue (with gilt buttons and white pique modesty panel). 

As a young parliamentary sketch writer I saw her wearing that suit in 1990 in her last days in office.

Another of the outfits is a rich burgundy, wool-twill two-piece she wore when leaving Downing Street for the last time as PM. 

The third is the fawn gaberdine raincoat – with pink lining – in which Mrs T rode a Challenger tank for a celebrated 1986 photo opportunity in Fallingbostel, Germany.

The three Aquascutum tailorings are jolly smart and must have set Denis back a few bob. 

'And yet there is something peculiar about exhibiting the late leaderene's schmutter. The clothes, draped over headless mannequins, seem to levitate in the air. They could be three corpses on a gibbet.

What does this tell us about the warp and weft of today's political Right? Should today's Conservatives still be obsessed with Thatcherism? Or would the Lady herself have thought such retrospection foolish?

Before the Conservatives win any election they will need to chime with 21st-century Britain and its voters. Kemi Badenoch delivers her speech during the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester

Outfits worn by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher are on display during the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, Britain, October 5 2025

Mrs Thatcher, who died in 2013, is everywhere at this conference. One of the fringe venues is called the Thatcher Theatre. 

Her name is splashed all over the Centre for Policy Studies stand and the Conservative Environment Network's pod. She keeps being invoked by platform speakers.

Such mentions generate appreciative nods from the creakier activists. You can sense them thinking: Thatcherism got us out of trouble half a century ago, so it's bound to work again, isn't it?

More Thatcher memorabilia is exhibited alongside her clothes. A 1975 party newsletter reports her election as leader in the February. 

It notes that Edward Heath was among the first to congratulate her after he 'gracefully stood down' as leader. Graceful Ted! 

The miserable old toad spent the next 30 years in a grump. Historical documents are not always true.

Relying on the Thatcher name for today's politics is similarly flawed. Can we imagine Mrs Thatcher, in 1975, harking back 50 years and having Stanley Baldwin's waistcoat and wing-collar exhibited at her party conference? 

A ridiculous idea. She was gripped by the present and the future, by technology and the class-defying liberation of money. She was on the button, rather terrifyingly so. Museums bored her.

If the Tories are to recover in time for a 2029 election they need to do so in a way that makes sense for the second quarter of the 21st century and talk to the young, not us mouldy ancients who remember Mrs T's glory years.

They must innovate, and not just in campaigning techniques, important though they are. They must be modern in political attitudes, vocal tone, informality and a preparedness to confront establishment institutions.

Margaret Thatcher's rivals used her shopping list as a means to smear her in an attempt to prevent her getting the top job

Mrs Thatcher was generally respectful to institutions. That was the Tory way in those days and it suited the times. But certain institutions, among them the civil service, BBC, police, judges, the National Trust, the House of Lords and many of the big charities have lost the right to automatic respect. 

To electrify tomorrow's voters, it may be necessary for Conservatives to detach themselves from romantic loyalties of the past.

The party may need to find a taste for radicalism, yet do so in a way that has more humour and reason than is currently displayed by rivals on the Right. 

Mrs Thatcher had many qualities but wit and a relaxed congeniality were not necessarily among them. She was a good hater, Mrs T, and hatred can make for political fuel.

But our current politics seems over-loaded by the stuff and I suspect there is mileage in a more tolerant radicalism.

Given some of the similarities between 2025 and 1975 – economic problems, over-mighty unions, a young woman in charge of the little-liked Tory opposition – and the centenary of her birth, the Thatcher references in Manchester this week are to some degree understandable. 

Mind you, being a woman at the top of politics is no longer as big a deal as it was in 1975. Kemi Badenoch is the Tories' fourth female leader and the last two were not exactly humdingers, at least in a positive way.

Many problems in government, throughout the world, are ageless: over-taxation, over-regulation, vested interests. 

Simply casting back to Maggie and her 1975 model is self-limiting and psychologically unhealthy for Mrs Badenoch's beleaguered troops. Voters may conclude they have a 'Mummy' complex.

If the Tories are to recover in time for a 2029 election they need to do so in a way that makes sense for the second quarter of the 21st century and talk to the young. Pictured: Mel Stride Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer delivers a speech

Margaret Thatcher meeting former European Commission president Jacques Delors (centre right) at the European single market conference in London

One of the more cringemaking Conservative gatherings of recent decades was in 2001 when William Hague was party leader and a ginny-voiced Mrs T, campaigning for him in the West Country, cited a cinema billboard for the film The Mummy Returns.

That campaign stunt was a mistake and the Thatcherite echoes now are similarly ill-judged. The past is another country. 

Today's Tories must find their own solutions and communicate them to today's electorate in a modern, urgent manner. The sight of those clothes is creepy. If necrophilia is not quite the term, perhaps thanatophilia is. 

That word means 'fascination with death-related subjects'. Politics is an activity for and by the living, not a sepia newsreel or a re-run of past injustices. It needs to brim with vitality and promise.

Mrs T, love her or loathe her (I fell somewhere in between), is history. Millions of today's voters were born after she left office. 

If the next General Election is held in 2029, and if Labour has by then achieved its aim of giving 16-year-olds the vote, many electors will have been born in the year of her death. 

If they know anything about Margaret Thatcher, it is unlikely, given the Left-wingery of many teachers, to be positive.

Add to this the continued negativity that mere mention of the name Thatcher generates in Wales and Scotland. Such kneejerk antipathy may be unattractive but it is a fact of life. Maggie still winds up the Left. 

At last week's Labour conference, and at both the TUC and Lib Dem conferences earlier in September, 'Thatcherism' was bandied about as a clinching insult.

Mrs Thatcher giving her resignation speech in November 1990 after 11 and a half years in office

For all that we sometimes complain about the trade unions and the public sector, they are (thanks to Mrs T) not so big a problem as they were in 1975.

Today we have different woes: mass immigration, globalisation, the disintegration of European power, Chinese aggression, the unreliability of the United States as an ally and, most of all, the violent unhappiness of so many of our citizens.

One of the core tenets of Thatcherism was self-sufficiency. She believed that people should make their own fortunes rather than living off the achievements of their forebears. 

We can learn from history and even gain inspiration from great figures of the past. But to raise them to the level of stuffed exhibits is as bad as wrapping dead queens in cotton and encasing them in pyramids, mummified.

I do not suggest that the 2025 Tories should disown Mrs Thatcher. Of course not. She was a remarkable woman who, half a century ago, turned her agile mind to rescuing our century. 

Now it needs rescuing again. If that is to happen, Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives must learn to write their own history.