It was a sunny morning in May. On my way out the hotel room, I reached into my bag, took out my copy of Stuart Hall’s The Hard Road to Renewal, and chucked it onto the bed. After strolling down Whitehall and past Big Ben, I arrived at the Emmanuel Centre.

Inside the grand rotunda, a gray-haired man named Christopher DeMuth welcomed the audience. As if talking to God, he looked up and assured the crowd of British and American conservatives that “Thatcher would approve of what we are doing here” and promised to share his “spicy stories” about Ole Maggie during the evening cocktail hour. Coming from a guy who headed the American Enterprise Institute from 1986 to 2008, DeMuth’s glorification of Thatcher was no surprise. What else was a self-described “old Anglophile American conservative” supposed to do?

The next day, in a panel on economics and conservatism, Juliet Samuel, a popular young columnist for the right-wing Times, declared, “A specter is haunting the conservative movement. It is the specter of Margaret Thatcher.” Highlighting the utter failure of Thatcher’s neoliberal economic agenda, Samuel concluded, “It is time to bury Mrs. Thatcher once and for all.” Sorry, DeMuth. Turns out those odes to the Iron Lady might not be so welcome here after all.