The spectre at the party

IT will be a fairly low key affair. Just the 670 guests, drawn from the worlds of politics, sport, showbusiness, the arts and other walks of life. Not forgetting the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Oh, and the Queen will be there, with Prince Philip of course.

As Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher never did anything half-heartedly. If it was worth doing, it was worth throwing herself into with gusto. As the elder stateswoman of British politics, it seems little has changed, as tonight's lavish reception to mark her 80th birthday demonstrates.

But in reality, much has happened in the 15 years since she departed Downing Street and the leadership of the Conservative Party. Some of that is physical: after a series of minor strokes, she is under doctor's orders not to make any more speeches, although that has not always stopped her. Her memory is also said to be on the wane.

Those years have also seen the death of her beloved Denis, and her son Mark's narrow escape from an African jail for his part in an alleged coup plot, as well as his subsequent divorce. In personal terms, recent years have not been kind to the Iron Lady.

But where her decline has been most starkly apparent is in the Tory leadership contest. Although two of the candidates - David Davis and Liam Fox - have been invited to tonight's bash, and the other two - Kenneth Clarke and David Cameron - pointedly not, this will be the first leadership election for 30 years where she has not played a leading role.

Not that her influence has necessarily been a good thing. John Major was her anointed in 1990, and her approval was subsequently granted to William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, none of whom was a conspicuous success.

And it was clear from last week's party conference that would-be leaders are keen to distance themselves from more than just her explicit support. Peppered with calls for modernisation, for reaching out, for becoming more inclusive, many of the speeches seemed an implicit rejection of the "No such thing as society" premier of the 1980s.

But if Baroness Thatcher's direct influence has become slight, the impact of her 15-year leadership of the party is still very much in evidence, says Neil Carter, politics lecturer at York University. And her most obvious legacy is in the make-up of today's Tory Party.

"In the 1970s it was a broad church, from landed gentry to estate agents, but the modern party comes from a very narrow background," he says. "That has happened with all political parties, but it is part of her legacy."

Perhaps more ominously for the Tories than creating a party of white collar professionals has been the rise of ideology. Traditionally, the Conservative Party's raison d'etre was winning elections, and it was pragmatic enough to do whatever needed to be done. As Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher was not above a little pragmatism, but her bequest to her party has been a regard for ideology quite absent from the party of Churchill and Macmillan.

"That has shaped recent leadership elections, and that is why they have ended up as losers and why they're struggling to change," says Dr Carter. "The obvious vote winner in the last two leadership elections was Ken Clarke, but because of his position on Europe he was unelectable to the party, and to some extent that is due to the change post-Thatcher.

"It has certainly harmed the party and made it difficult to get back into an election-winning position."

But if her legacy for the Tories may have been to follow 18 years in office with a period in the electoral wilderness, her influence has been no less profound on the wider political scene and on the country as a whole.

The Thatcherite agenda of privatised industry, weakened trade unions and a reduced welfare state is still largely intact and relatively secure, accepted by New Labour just as the post-war's creation of the welfare state was unchallenged by subsequent Conservative governments. Indeed, her "solving" of the trades union problem was a huge favour to her opponents, removing one of the chief obstacles to Labour returning to power, fear of union influence.

In some ways, it may be Tony Blair who is Mrs Thatcher's real heir, and although this has been used as an insult by the Labour left, the Prime Minister is said to glow every time he hears the comparison. The British wing of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, set up to promote her ideals around the world, may have been dissolved just before the last election, but it may have been as much because it was no longer needed as that it was no longer making progress.

"The difficulty is that Blair has taken the hard-edged Thatcherite policies and softened them up, so that it is hard to discern a clear target for the Conservatives now," says Nick Randall, lecturer in British politics at Newcastle University.

And the problem for her Tory successors is not just that Mr Blair has stolen their clothes, but that a return to "real" Thatcherism would be misplaced. "The approach that Thatcher adopted was probably entirely suitable for the time, and to a certain extent she got results, but to suggest that you could just do that again is inappropriate," says Dr Randall. "We have resolved a lot of those problems."

He says Mrs Thatcher can be held directly responsible for some of the difficulties which beset John Major's government, particularly the divisions over Europe. And although he was her choice to follow in her footsteps, it was an unhappy legacy: he was the only one of her successors absent from a party last year to mark 25 years since her first election victory.

But Dr Randall says her influence over New Labour may be exaggerated, perhaps deliberately by a Prime Minister wanting to associate himself with strong leadership. "It did result in a transformation in what the Labour Party offered, although there were also other things behind that. But New Labour isn't as Thatcherite as it presents itself, there is a lot of relatively social democratic stuff as well," he adds.

He believes that many of the major changes for which Baroness Thatcher or her admirers would like to claim credit would have happened anyway, although perhaps not as quickly or as brutally. But even if she was riding a right-wing wave, she still had a role to play and managed to take the neo-liberal agenda further than almost anywhere else.

And if her followers may still relish the role she played in transforming society, there will be those among the party-goers tonight who yearn for her party to escape her grip. In his final conference speech as leader, Michael Howard last week ranked her alongside Winston Churchill and anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce. It is not hard to see in those words a hope, however faint, that like them, she will soon be part of the party's history, and not overshadowing its future.