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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: So, if David Cameron didn’t have enough problems, today he has learned that he is less popular than Margaret Thatcher, one of the most divisive Prime Ministers of the last century, that’s according to a new poll from YouGov and the Policy Exchange. Well one thing Margaret Thatcher had much more of than Cameron was working class support so how can the Prime Minister, who has been called out of touch by one of his own party, and arrogant, how can he fix this? Well joining me now are Conservative MPs Esther McVey and Peter Bone and the Public Policy Editor of the Economist, Anne McElvoy, a very good morning to you all. We’ll start with you Anne, what do you think David Cameron can learn from Margaret Thatcher in terms of that appeal?

ANN McELVOY: Well just to pick up on your point that she was unpopular throughout most of her premiership, which she certainly was but of course she kept winning elections which is the ultimate acid test of political popularity. It’s nice to have the good opinion of people in between times but frankly what counts is whether you get re-elected and therefore whether you can implement your programme and I think with Margaret Thatcher no-one had any doubts about what she was trying to do. She was forthright, to a fault at times, about what she wanted to do so people could sort of take it or leave and for a long time they took it, much to the chagrin of the Labour party which could never understand why she was so unpopular and yet kept getting elected. I think David Cameron has got a different problem, he wants to implement parts of a quite Thatcherite agenda but he doesn’t want to be unpopular in between elections so he is saying love me, please take me as a I am and I’m a normal sort of bloke but at the same time he does want to do some quite radical things and I think he gets caught between these two different objectives.

DM: Let’s see if our Conservatives buy into that. Esther, do you think he should forget the temporary popularity or not and just get on with the programme?

ESTHER McVEY: Well I think he is and you’re quite right, he set out what he planned to do for five years, it was a five year agenda, not a two year one, not a three year one and we are in a coalition and not a Conservative government and the first thing we had to do was get the budget under control. When you ain’t got much money there’s not much you can do and when you are saying no to people, we can’t afford, let’s be honest you’re not going to be popular. But he has got to stick to his guns and he really has got to do that, he has got to get that under control and at the same time look what we’re doing with welfare. We have said it has to pay to go to work, we’re very clear there; education, we have to get that under control because we’ve fallen in all the OECD tables therefore that was wrong, so many things. How about exports, what about manufacturing? All these things he’s doing, we’ve got to do and it is a five year plan and we’ve got to stick to it.

DM: Peter Bone, as Anne laid out there, it was the radicalism of those Thatcher administrations and they held fast to it through temporary unpopularity and went on to win those elections.

PETER BONE: Only the media could describe Mrs Thatcher as unpopular. She was the greatest peace time prime minister ever, she was extremely popular. She wasn’t popular with left leaning people in the media … no, no, it’s the truth of the matter, no, no, she was popular, exceptionally popular.

DM: She won elections but if you look at the polls, before the Falklands conflict in 1982 they were behind the SDP.

PB: Look at the polls after the Falklands conflict, she was exceptionally popular.

DM: I did and as Anne said, she was divisive, you would accept that?

PB: Oh absolutely, there were different opinions about her but how can you possibly suggest that a Conservative prime minister who has one hand tied behind his back in a coalition would be more popular than Mrs Thatcher? Nobody, no peace time prime minister is going to be more popular than she was.

DM: Anne McElvoy is saying he seems concerned about it, he wants to be loved.

AM: Yes, he is worried about it.

PB: Do you know any prime minister who didn’t want to be loved?

AM: Margaret Thatcher!

PB: Oh no, no, she wanted to be …

AM: No, I don’t think she particularly cared, Peter, whether in between elections, in a way she drew strength from it, she drew strength from the battle and one thing that David Cameron is going to have to learn is that you have to do that. He has tried not to hasn’t he, he has tried to trim and he has tried to say I’m a Conservative prime minister but I love my coalition Liberal Democrats…

EM: We are living in a very different time, it was a daily newspaper, it was only three channels, two channels, now David Cameron is living in an age where everybody has got a point of view at any moment in time and you can get a momentum on …

AM: But are you saying that he needs to be as far behind in the polls as he is because that would seem to me to be slightly perverse. Clearly something has gone wrong and …

EM: I never said that at all, what I’m saying is that … no, I didn’t, I said he has got to be aware of what the public are saying and therefore he always, because you have got a constant barometer of what the people are thinking, you have got to make sure okay, are we communicating clearly …

DM: So one of the key things that the public are thinking, we heard it from Nadine Dorries as well, that they are posh boys, that they are out of touch. You must be hearing that given your background, you must be hearing that he doesn’t think like us, he doesn’t understand our struggles.

EM: Let’s be dead straight about this, he is a posh boy, that’s right, he went to a posh school, he got a brilliant double first I think it was from Oxford, that’s right.

DM: And he’s very rich.

EM: But let’s put it this way, and he represents a certain amount of the population, now I wouldn’t want to be discriminated against because I have a Scouse accent and come from Liverpool and I don't think we should be discriminating against anybody who’s posh from a posh background. You know what, we cannot choose where we are born into, it’s what you do with that, what you go forward with and how you resonate with people. You know what, there’s not just him in the Conservative party, there’s over 300 other Conservative MPs, a new raft from the 2010 intake who do represent the rest of the country, he now has to reach out and resonate with those people.

DM: Okay, so are you again saying on this, and Peter Bone, do you feel that he should be more upfront about this instead of every now again … saying yes, I am rich, get over it? The perception at the moment is that George Osborne and David Cameron are not doing that.

EM: One thing though, I don’t believe that he is arrogant and I don’t believe he is out of touch. A lot of the stuff I do with social mobility he has personally helped me with and George Osborne has with the stuff I’m doing with executive remuneration so they are not out of touch.

PB: As someone who went to a comprehensive school and a grammar school and aren’t posh, the fact that you are rich or no has got no relevance to how good you are as a politician. That is a ridiculous charge that because you are posh you should not be running the country. The question is, what are you doing for the country, are you listening to people and those are the questions and that’s what the electorate … and there will be a big test this week on whether Boris or Ken gets elected. If Boris gets elected there is going to be a big vote for the Conservatives and it shows we are still very popular, if there is a vote for Ken it will show that Labour are, that’s what happens there.

DM: But they do tell us more about the personalities and neither of them for different reasons within their parties have actually been seen with too many front bench spokes people but let’s move on from that and the issue of posh, whether it matters or not. In the great scheme of things it doesn’t, we’re celebrating the Sunday Times Rich List but somehow politically that feeling is rife amongst the electorate that you’re doing things for your particular segment of the economic community and not for us.

AM: That is a very potent charge and I don't think it’s quite right to just say well yes, we’re posh, get over it and we went to Oxford and got good firsts, so did a lot of other people, I think the problem is they seem to live in their own world and a quite tight social world and some aspects, including things like the accusation of being too close to the Chipping Norton set have perhaps reinforced that so if you have a political problem with it, it’s no good saying it doesn’t exist or it doesn’t matter because it clearly is resonating out there therefore you have to deal with it. I think Number Ten for instance is slightly, I do think there are too many Etonians in Number Ten if you ask me, not because I’m chippy but because I think you need more of a range of experience and that is a problem when you have got both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor from quite similar backgrounds, you have to address it whether you like it or not.

DM: On Margaret Thatcher’s appeal to that, it was then called the working class vote, she was lower middle class herself and she was very much, Peter Bone, characterised by the shopping basket, the grocery in Grantham, that she knew the price of a pint of milk, she’d sold plenty of them and that perception is that that this lot don’t.

PB: Well we’re not a Conservative government and that’s one of the problems, you’ve got to say we’re not doing what we really want to do. Now I represent a Midlands seat, I was elected by the very people who you’re talking about largely and we had a really good message at the last election, controlling immigration, tough on law and order, tough with Europe. We haven’t been able to carry all those things out because the Liberal Democrats, these so-called colleagues of ours, are holding us back. Now you know my opinion that the coalition should end as soon as possible but that is why it’s not a fair comparison.

AM: But you didn’t win an overall majority and that’s why you are complaining about the Liberal Democrats, because you weren’t able to win an overall majority with your vision.

PB: I know but if you want to rewrite history we should have continued as a minority government.

DM: Esther McVey, it’s the Lib Dems fault is what Peter Bone is saying.

PB: Absolutely!

EM: What I would say is why I am a Conservative is because I believe in choice, I believe in freedom, I believe in aspiration and I think that’s the thing. When we talk about choice we have now got to have the ability to choose and you can’t believe that choice is only limited to a certain class and what the Conservatives have got to ensure that they do is put the stepping stones in place so that we all have the choice, so Margaret Thatcher did the right to buy homes, we have got to say the right to a good education, we’ve got to say the right not to be in debt forever, we’ve got to say the right to …

AM: But can you honestly say you were happy with the candidate mix at the last election? I mean you sound like a perfectly normal human being …

EM: I’d like to think so!

AM: …but what happened is they went down a certain route to get a certain kind of candidate in and somehow along the way they didn’t get enough candidates from comprehensive education which for our generation is perfectly normal and they didn’t get enough candidates from the north. You must admit that something went a bit awry there.

EM: We didn’t get enough candidates in the north, we haven’t got enough seats in the north, that is something that we have totally got to address but the people I knock about with I’d say are Steve McPartland, Carl McCartney, Therese Coffey all originally from Liverpool, you’ve got Margot James, you’ve got Jason McCartney, so many people who are actually all those things, you just don’t know about them because they will be in the next raft. We’ve only been in two years, we’re finding out feet and moving forward.

DM: We are discussing social backgrounds, it should be said that the Thatcher cabinet, the one that was initially formed in 1979 and subsequent ones, had plenty of posh people in them, Peter Bone.

PB: You are absolutely right, I mean this is such a false argument. I’ll tell you, when I sit in the House of Commons with 300 Tory MPs, I don’t know what their social background is. To be honest I didn’t know what Esther’s was until we were on this programme, it is what they talk about and what they care about. I want to support a certain view of Conservatism and that’s what matters, it doesn’t matter what the background is.

AM: I think that it certainly is out of date in the way that you’re presenting it.

PB: Well I know that you don’t think that I’m a normal human being and Esther is.

AM: No, I’m sure you are a very nice human being but you are just out of date in the way you are retailing politics to the public. It’s a retail game, it is not just a game about what you think between the benches in Westminster.

DM: Let me just come in here and continue to focus on the Thatcher comparison, you talk there about it being different times, it’s thirty years on for goodness sake and the appeal that Margaret Thatcher had to certain sections let’s say of the electorate that the Conservative party previously had not done, is that possible now? We talked about council house sales and the overall message that we won’t stand in your way if you want to do well, to work hard and to better yourself.

AM: But hang on, that assumes that the same sort of aspiration message is going to play now in the economic circumstances we’re in.

DM: I’m saying will it?

AM: Well I think they are rather different. I am very much on the side of the aspirant in politics, I think it’s been incredibly important. Tony Blair certainly was very good at that kind of politics but I think at the moment a lot of people who would have been aspiring before are simply scared and are worried about falling backwards rather than going forwards so you have got a slightly different game of reassurance and a sort of ‘I’m on your side’ ism which you possibly don’t have when everything is going pretty well in the economy, you expect your kids to do a bit better than you. If you really think that your children might fall down the social economic scale from where you are, you’re in a very different place psychologically.

DM: Isn’t it the case, Peter Bone, that Margaret Thatcher also had some pretty big windmills to tilt at and we mentioned one when it came to the Argentinians and the Falklands but of course the trade unions. There is no big issue that you can actually deal with easily that faces David Cameron, it’s the economy and that’s just so difficult to get right.

PB: Well you’ve answered the question, the big issue is solely the economy and Mrs Thatcher also had to deal with that when she was in power but if you think there were easy answers to the trade unions and the Falklands War, I think at that time people were saying that Margaret Thatcher was wrong on both the things – we shouldn’t have sent a task force, you shouldn’t be reforming the unions – she was proved right. Now of course what we’re doing with one hand tied behind our back is solving an economic mess that we’ve not seen the likes of, inherited from Labour – whether it was their fault or not we inherited it – and that’s the problem we have to deal with and that’s what this government will be judged by.

DM: Esther McVey, you have been very loyal so far about what you detail has been done by this government, of course in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, but is the anything else you would like to see David Cameron, George Osborne and others in Cabinet, really pushing forward on that can get that ear of the electorate, that can chime, because it is deficit reduction, deficit reduction, deficit reduction?

EM: Well one thing I know Anne was saying there about aspiration, that isn’t necessarily it, but I think something that is there forever and a day, for all time, is life fulfilment and that’s what people want to say – I did what I went to do, I wanted to do and there weren’t barriers put in front of me - and I think that is what we are trying to grapple with. That’s why I am saying it is about good education, it is about the ability to do. A paper I’ve just put in now to Vince Cable was about executive pay, remuneration and again a balance there, what are we going to do when you have got shareholders rebelling, you’ve got the stakeholders not being engaged with. It is about people being not just good citizens but big corporate organisations being good corporate organisations and we’ve got to get a grip of that as well because businesses are part of society, they feed into it, pensions come from there, they employ people and we’ve got to get a grip of that. We are the party for business, we are the party for individuals who want to aspire and have life fulfilment and we have got to make sure we get our message across.

DM: Okay, well I must bring it to a close there, thank you all very much indeed for your expertise there, Anne, Esther and Peter.