Two people are running to be Britain's next Prime Minister, but a third presence looms over the contest: Margaret Thatcher.

The late former Prime Minister dominated Britain in the 1980s, and has left a large and contested legacy. Critics see her as an intransigent ideologue whose free-market policies frayed social bonds and gutted the country's industrial communities. But for the governing Conservative Party, Thatcher is an icon, an inspiration and the presiding spirit who made Britain fit for the modern era.

In the race to replace Boris Johnson as Conservative leader and Prime Minister, both Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and former Treasury chief Rishi Sunak claim to embody the values of Thatcher, who died in 2013 at 87.

Asked who was Britain's greatest Prime Minister? Both candidates unhesitatingly say Thatcher. Sunak made a key speech in the late leader's hometown of Grantham, declaring himself a proponent of “common-sense Thatcherism,” while his wife and children took selfies in front of the Iron Lady's bronze statue.

Truss talks about her own modest origins, inviting comparisons to grocer's daughter Thatcher, and adopts poses and outfits — bold blue dresses, pussy-bow blouses — that echo the distinctive style of Britain's first female Prime Minister.

Historian Richard Vinen of King's College London says Truss is an “Instagram Thatcher.”

Victoria Honeyman, associate professor of British politics at the University of Leeds, says Thatcher is “a talisman” for Conservatives. Robert Saunders, a historian of modern Britain at Queen Mary University of London, believes “she has become a creature of myth.”

“Like Thor's hammer, Thatcher's handbag can bestow godlike powers on those deemed worthy to lift it,” Saunders wrote on the Unherd website.

In one sense, the Thatcher fixation is easily explained. She led the Conservatives to three successive election victories and was never defeated at the ballot box. She was eventually brought down — like Johnson — by her own party, ousted in 1990 after 11 years in power.

“Every Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher has failed,” said Vinen, author of the book “Thatcher's

Britain.”

John Major lost the party power in 1997, and the three leaders after him kept the Tories in opposition. Prime Minister David Cameron gambled on a 2016 referendum that, against his wishes, took Britain out of the European Union. His successor Theresa May was defeated by Brexit infighting, and Johnson has been given the boot by Conservative lawmakers after months of ethics scandals.