ABSTRACT
Margaret Thatcher is an extraordinary phenomenon. She is the only woman prime minister in British history. She was prime minister from May 1979 to November 1990 and eleven and a half years is a comfortably longer stint than anyone else has achieved in the twentieth century. She also held the office for a longer continuous period than anyone for more than a century and a half – in fact since Lord Liverpool’s fifteen-year tenure was prematurely halted by a stroke in 1827. She won three successive general elections, two of them by landslide majorities. No other party leader this century has won more than two, and then with smaller majorities overall. Thatcher claims to have changed the course of British history. Change as moral crusade is the leitmotif of her career. As early as 1977, when asked by the right-wing journalist Patrick Cosgrave, who was then acting as one of her special advisers, what she had changed, she replied, simply, ‘Everything’.1 When she was preparing her first Queen’s Speech in 1979, a speech which many of her detractors say she would like to have given in person, it was uppermost in her thinking: ‘If the opportunity to set a radical new course is not taken’, she wrote in her Memoirs, ‘it will almost certainly never recur. . . . I was determined to send out a clear signal of change’.2
