Like Thatcher, Hanson won’t use the F-word. But it’s central to her appeal

June 7, 2026 — 5:00am

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In 1973, when she was British education secretary, Margaret Thatcher said she didn’t think there would be a female prime minister in her lifetime. In 1979, she became Britain’s first female prime minister, but she made it clear she was no affirmative action pick.

“I owe nothing to women’s lib,” she said in an interview in 1982.

Thatcher, the original right-wing strongwoman, in whose court-shoe-shod footsteps many have followed, was a trailblazing woman who held feminism in contempt. According to her adviser Paul Johnson, she once said: “The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.”

Conservative female politicians often have trouble using the F-word in reference to themselves, but none more so than populist strongwomen, a particular breed of female politician for which Thatcher is the original model.

In contemporary Italy we have Giorgia Meloni, in France we have Marine Le Pen, in Germany there are Frauke Petry and Alice Weidel (who is not just a woman but a non-heterosexual one), and in Japan, Sanae Takaichi. In Australia, we have One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, who we learnt this week is a possible prime ministerial aspirant.

All these women are pieces in what the International Journal of Public Leadership calls “the apparent puzzle of the presence of successful right-wing-populist women” who are “competing for power in movements that prioritise the performance of aggressive masculinity”.

Right-wing populism relies on family-first values that pitch back to an allegedly better time, when gender roles were clear and the nuclear family was provided for by a male breadwinner. In its more insidious presentations, it........

© Brisbane Times