Margaret Thatcher Comes Top as PM Britons Would Chose to Handle Pandemic

Thatcher
JOHNNY EGGITT/AFP/Getty
Victoria Friedman

A plurality of Britons would have preferred former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to have handled the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, a poll found.

YouGov asked 5,511 adults in Great Britain in a poll published on Wednesday: “Regardless of how you view them otherwise, if you had to choose one British Prime Minister from the last forty years to have handled the Covid-19 outbreak, who would it have been?”

A plurality, 29 per cent, of Britons said that the late Conservative Party Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady who led the country from 1979 to 1990, would have been best placed to handle the Covid-19 outbreak.

Followed by the Don’t Knows (27 per cent), came the distant runner-up Tony Blair (Labour, 1997-2007) at 14 per cent, less than half as many who backed Mrs Thatcher.

Gordon Brown (Labour, 2007-2010) was the next most popular choice at 10 per cent, with Conservative incumbent Boris Johnson slipping into single-digit territory with nine per cent.

The rear was taken up by Theresa May (2016-2019) at four per cent, and John Major (1990-1997) and David Cameron (2010-2016) both with three per cent.

Unsurprisingly, Labour voters were most likely to prefer Tony Blair (29 per cent) and Gordon Brown (24 per cent). Likewise with Conservatives with Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson, but Conservatives were more than twice as likely (54 per cent) to back Mrs Thatcher than the most recent Conservative prime minister, Mr Johnson (19 per cent).

A poll from May 2019 put Margaret Thatcher first for trust in leading the Brexit negotiations, which at the time were floundering under the premiership of Britain’s second woman prime minister, Theresa May.

Another poll from that month put Mrs Thatcher as the UK’s greatest post-World War Two prime minister, while BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in December 2016 begrudgingly named the Iron Lady the most influential woman of the past 70 years.

Responding to the poll, chairman of The Bow Group, the UK’s oldest conservative think tank, Ben Harris-Quinney, told Breitbart London: “The poll is a heavy condemnation of the prime minister’s handling of the pandemic, which has been disastrous, but it is a yet greater condemnation of the last 30 years of British politics generally.

“Most people feel, and certainly conservatives feel, that we haven’t had a leader in Britain since Margaret Thatcher.

“The establishment stitch-up system now offers us only an endless conveyor belt of globalist liberals, who have nothing to add to the nation other than the enrichment of themselves and their cronies.

“We need systemic change, so we can shake up the system, and get new people into positions of power that represent what the people really want. Otherwise, we make the decline of this country inevitable.”

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