Unflashy, camera-shy, socially awkward and a hit with British voters—at least, the English and Welsh variety—Theresa May is leading her Conservative troops into battle as the self-proclaimed champion of “ordinary working people” ahead of June’s general election.

Coming from almost any other Tory, this might have been a cheeky joke at the clique of half-baked revolutionaries in Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s camp. But Mrs. May doesn’t “do” jokes. If she wins the sweeping Conservative victory she seeks, Britons will have given their mandate to an unabashed interventionist, passionately convinced of “the good that government can do” and the duty of the state to mend society’s ills, curb capitalism’s excesses and stand as a bulwark against the unsettling forces of globalization.

Welcome back—just possibly—to the pre-Thatcher Britain I grew up in, the land that coined the word “Butskellism.” A conflation of the surnames of the Tory Party’s Rab Butler and Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, Butskellism was shorthand for a left-leaning, corporatist postwar mind-set in both main parties. Fear of change—and, in the Tory case, fear of an increasingly welfare-dependent electorate—kept much of the economy unprofitably in state hands for fear of committing the crime of “selling off the family silver,” and the whole country in thrall to over-mighty trade unions.

It trapped politicians into generally fruitless efforts to banish stagflation by controlling prices and wages, and to ward off economic decline with “industrial strategies” that mainly amounted to subsidizing flagging industries. These were decades sacrificed to a bungling corporatism, culminating in the late 1970s in near-bankruptcy. They should have taught us that the most untrustworthy of all political phenomena is “a safe pair of hands.”

Margaret Thatcher took risks; calculated risks, for the most part. Like the Greek goddess Pallas Athene, she took care to pick battles she could win, but she was no less a radical for that because at its core hers was a gamble that the British could be persuaded that the key to national recovery was to reward individual effort, encourage ambition and open up the marketplace to competition.