Bernard Ingham: Cameron charm offensive versus the Thatcher handbag

She records in The Downing Street Years that I told her that if she thought I could convey a sense of unity and purpose in her government, she had another think coming – or words to that effect. There are no prizes for guessing what I would have to tell Cameron.

Superficially, the two governments are in remarkably similar holes. How’s this for a list of common problems that suggests how little progress we have made in 31 years – unemployment, inflation, oil prices, over-regulation, levels of taxation, public sector crowding out the private sector, the millstone of election promises of increased expenditure, Treasury borrowing, negativism in the Civil Service, strikes, terrorism, Europe and Iran, not to mention Cabinet “dissent by leaks”?

Will Cameron end up telling his party conference – as Thatcher did in 1980 – “You turn if you want to – the lad’s not for turning”? But who would he be speaking to? The Tories, who generally think he is all too ready to turn to appease, the Lib Dems? Or the electorally-shattered Lib Dems, who have nowhere else to turn?

After all, Labour under Ed Miliband looks as unelectable as under Michael Foot.

This is where we begin to discover that the hole Cameron finds himself in is a lot different from Thatcher’s. It is not just that he presides over a very different coalition – a marriage of national convenience with the alien Lib Dems compared to a Conservative government, but a coalition, nonetheless, with a useful majority of 43.

The real differences are of scale. Cameron does not have to break a 35-year pale pink socialist consensus. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did not substantially undo, as distinct from undermine, Thatcher’s work of dismantling a corporate state “run” by a compromising government, the CBI and the dominant unions.

Strikes are now an irritant, not endemic. There is more room in Britain for the entrepreneur to wheel and deal.

Cameron’s problem is largely defined by a budget deficit of £150bn whereas Thatcher fretted over a public sector borrowing requirement of £8bn, which, even allowing for inflation, starkly measures Brown’s irresponsibility. But Thatcher laboured with inflation and interest rates around 17 per cent; under Cameron, they are a mere 4 and 0.5 per cent. respectively.

Cameron will be largely judged by whether he can restore Britain’s public finances and to a lesser degree by how he insulates us – as Thatcher did with the unions – from further abuse of power by the banks.

If he does, he will win high marks for achieving it through an uneasy coalition in which the likes of Chris Huhne and Vincent Cable mirror those of the waterlogged Sir Ian Gilmour and Norman St John Stevas in Thatcher’s time.

She sacked both and later wrote waspishly that Gilmour gave her the same loyalty on the backbenches as he did in Cabinet. As for Stevas, he “turned indiscretion into a political principle”. The Thatcher years were not marked by brotherly (or sisterly) love.

Cameron’s international challenges are greater. He inherited a war and has acquired a bit of another in Libya. Thatcher had still to fight one.

Osama bin Laden may have been disposed of and the “Arab spring” may currently be marginalising Islamic militancy, but terrorism is on a vaster scale than the IRA’s bloodlust in 1980.

The Western alliance is decidedly wet and wonky and Europe is a spendthrift, politically correct nonsense we could do without as economic power shifts eastwards into the tougher Chinese and Russian orbits.

Even allowing for the Cold War in 1980, Cameron’s world – with millions on the move for better homes to go to – is perhaps more fraught than Thatcher’s.

But one year in the scale of their ambition is similar. Both sought to rescue the nation’s finances as a preliminary to changing Britain.

Thatcher, buoyed up by faith in her people, set out to liberate political and economic freedom from socialist shackles.

Cameron seeks to build on that by making the great services of the state – education, health, welfare and justice – fit for responsible and aspiring citizens.

If Cameron succeeds, he will prove that charm can get you everywhere. Thatcher proved that all you need is a handbag filled with conviction.

Charm looks more promising in 2011 than did the swinging satchel of 1980. But we were a more demoralised nation then.