As Labour prepares for power, the party’s leading lights are busy u-turning: not least on their views on Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady is Labour’s inspiration du jour, much to the anger of the party’s lefties. First, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones claimed that Thatcher oversaw a decade of ‘national renewal’. Then shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves chose to pitch herself as a modern day Iron Lady at Tuesday’s Mais lecture. And now shadow foreign secretary David Lammy has been busy singing Thatcher’s praises, with Lammy telling Politico that the Tory leader was a ‘visionary leader for the UK’.

But Lammy has not always been keen to talk up the virtues of Mrs T. In fact, many of his previous social media interactions would suggest quite the opposite. In 2019, the Labour MP for Tottenham slammed the first female prime minister, tweeting: ‘Northern industrial areas were decimated by Thatcher.’ He added: ‘The proportion in the country living below the poverty line rose from 13 per cent to 43 per cent.’

Northern industrial areas were decimated by Thatcher. When she took power unemployment was at 1 million but that quickly tripled to 3 million in the early 80s. The proportion in the country living below the poverty line rose from 13% to 43%.

— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) February 1, 2019

Then, in 2021, Lammy compared Thatcher’s decision to end free milk handouts at schools to Johnson’s pandemic education plans, posting a rather scathing message about both Tory leaders on both his Twitter and Facebook accounts…

Margaret Thatcher snatched schoolchildren’s milk. @BorisJohnson is snatching schoolchildren’s futures.

— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) June 3, 2021

Only a year ago, Lammy gave a speech to London’s Chatham House in which he told his audience that from ‘growing up poor in Tottenham in Thatcher’s Britain, I know the pain of living through a cost of living crisis.’ Odd, then, that the shadow foreign secretary has demonstrated such a remarkable change of heart over the last few days. Mr S wouldn’t dare to suggest that the upcoming election has anything to do with this epiphany…

The change in Labour’s rhetoric certainly hasn’t escaped the attention of the party’s opponents — at today’s PMQs, SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn made a jibe at Starmer’s ‘born-again Thatcherites’ to much laughter. The latest Labour party x Thatcher crossover comes some months after Sir Keir Starmer declared in the Sunday Telegraph that ‘Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism’. It was more than a little inconsistent with Starmer’s previous comments about Mrs T, as Steerpike pointed out at the time…

How very curious. While the lady wasn’t for turning, it seems Labour certainly is.