The object of Keith Joseph’s admiration in this 1974 speech was not Margaret Thatcher, but another ‘middle-aged woman’, Mary Whitehouse. But Joseph could just as well have been talking about Thatcher. As we shall see, both women identified and amplified disenchantment with the permissive society in the 1970s. Both were populists, presenting themselves as ordinary women taking on an effete or decadent establishment. Both sought to renew Britain as a Christian nation. Each encouraged the other in her endeavours. For Margaret Thatcher, a crisis of values was an important part of the broader crisis she diagnosed in the 1970s, and the remoralisation of society was among the medicines she prescribed. Where she encountered some difficulty was in explaining who or what would drive this remoralisation. Her belief in the inadequacy of state action presented a problem; if the state could not remoralise society, then what could?

The moral and religious dimensions of Thatcherism have been overlooked in existing accounts, which have tended to concentrate on what Thatcherism achieved, in terms of concrete policy, rather than on what it represented. Because the main policy manifestations of Thatcherism were economic, historians have tended to view it as primarily an economic phenomenon. Anna Marie Smith bewailed this in her 1994 book on Thatcherism, race and sexuality, but despite the appearance of some very distinguished contributions on Thatcherism since then, economistic readings of Thatcherism continue to predominate.