As Thatcher discovered in the autumn of 1990, a hitherto dominant party leader and prime minister can suffer a catastrophic loss of support from former party loyalists due to serious policy disagreements entailing high-profile clashes with senior ministers, plummeting opinion poll ratings, by-election defeats, and/or a growing conviction among their party's MPs that the leader's glory days are well and truly behind them. Many of these scenarios can occur when a party leader and prime minister erroneously becomes convinced of their own political invincibility and immortality, and insistence that they are still revered by the people. In Thatcher's case, however, her hubris developed against a deteriorating economic situation characterized by rising inflation and higher interest rates following the 1986 “Big Bang” deregulation of financial services, her personal association with the widely reviled Community Charge or “Poll Tax”, and her increasingly undiplomatic anti-European comments and speeches.

Yet expectations or hopes that Thatcher's resignation would herald a revival of One Nation Toryism were not realized. Instead, despite subsequent Conservative leaders initially advocating a more conciliatory, constructive and inclusive mode of Conservatism which embraced the social and cultural changes Britain had recently experienced, the party has become steadily more Thatcherite, not only in terms of its economic policies and priorities, but in terms of the ideological stance of an increasing number of Conservative MPs. From the early 1990s onwards, the One Nation Tories were not replenished by a new cohort, but were instead steadily replaced by economic liberals who shared the ideological commitment to the free market, and therefore a continuation, or even intensification, of privatization, public sector reform, restrictions on trade unions, tax cuts and welfare retrenchment.

When there has been an occasional departure from these policies, such as the part-privatized probation service being renationalized in May 2019, it was because the private sector companies operating it either suffered severe financial problems, or failed to provide a satisfactory level of service as stipulated in their contracts. Meanwhile, the higher government borrowing and pay subsidies (furlough schemes) implemented during the 2020‒21 Covid pandemic was an ad hoc crisis-management response to an unforeseen and unprecedented scenario that threatened economic catastrophe, not a reversion back to pre-Thatcherite Conservatism. In neither instance did the more active or interventionist role of the state herald a formal abandonment of Thatcherite neoliberalism overall.