Liz Truss's Premiership shows it's time to lay the ghost of Thatcher and look forward - Jayne Dowle

As recent events have proved, the shade of the Iron Lady has for too long cast a shadow over the Conservative Party. Her gigantic influence showed itself across the Tory Party grassroots membership - average age 72, according to The Bow Group, a think tank, and 71 per cent male, according to research conducted before the General Election of 2019 – during the summer leadership campaign.

And in the House of Commons? It’s a common trope to suggest that a certain kind of traditional Conservative MP - male, probably public school-educated, of a certain age - still yearns for the heady combination of authoritarianism and glamour that Mrs T personified at the height of her powers.

And sadly, this led in turn to some of these members being seduced by the cynical cosplay of departing Liz Truss, who aped her icon in a number of photo opportunities, including that ill-advised pose on top of a tank. You have to feel slightly sorry for Leeds-educated Truss really, because she clearly never had the strength of character to strike out on her own.

However, this is not to say it’s just men who are still seduced by her heroine.

My late mother-in-law, born into a modest family in Bedfordshire in 1921, idolised her contemporary, who had been fortunate enough to finish her education and take an Oxford degree, in chemistry. For women of my mother-in-law’s generation, ‘Margaret’ was an absolute role model, because she had risen above her shopkeeping roots and gone on to take the most important job in the land.

But we’re talking about a person born in 1925, almost a century ago. It would have been absolutely unthinkable in the 1980s, say, for a major political party to still be influenced so strongly by a leader born a century before, in the Victorian age.

So why are the Conservatives still so obsessed with this woman?

That she was followed by Sir John Major, who no-one could have accused of holding similar charisma, laid the foundations for the cult. That the next Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, despite his modernising agenda, eventually showed himself to be as reactionary as the next man, and the fact that despite - or perhaps because of - her more compassionate nature, Theresa May failed to live up to her pioneering female predecessor’s image, did not help.

Followed by the buffoonish antics of Boris Johnson, is it any wonder that when faced with a leadership choice, a grim-faced Liz Truss in her tank helmet held a certain kind of appeal?

Truss might share the same chromosomes, but she was never Thatcher, and was never going to be – one look at her economic policies should have told them that.

If we can take one positive from the chaos that has engulfed the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ in the last week it’s that the next Conservative leader must surely be chosen on the basis of merit and suitability for the job, and not because of a Tory desire to re-create barely-remembered halcyon days of Thatcherism.

And this is what I mean about younger Conservatives. Sara Britcliffe, 27, the youngest Tory MP returned to office in 2019, for Hyndburn in Lancashire, was born in 1995, five years after Thatcher resigned.

Surely young politicians like her must want to create a modern, savvy, engaged political party in their own image, not that of a former leader who could have been their great-grandmother.

We are a conservative nation, with a small ‘c’ if nothing else. The national outpouring of grief when the Queen passed away last month proved that.

However, this worshipping of past political icons, and let’s not forget Johnson’s mind-boggling obsession with Sir Winston Churchill - who came back to Downing Street for a second four-year term in 1951 - has got to stop.

While ever we have the Conservatives in charge, this is surely making Great Britain the laughing stock of the world.

If I was a young Tory MP, especially if I’d found myself with an unexpected seat at the 2019 General Election and was now desperately wondering what could possibly happen next, I would be doing all in my power to challenge this obsession with past glories.

I’d start by taking down all those portraits of Mrs T, and put them in attics, where they belong.