ABSTRACT
Political reputations commonly nosedive in the years immediately after leaving office. It might almost be said that the greater the impact, the bigger the negative correction and few made a greater impact from No. 10 Downing Street than Margaret Thatcher. In the short term, John Major proved a great relief, precisely because he was not Thatcher. Many commentators considered that his emollient, consensual style was precisely what the nation needed after more than a decade being dragged around Margaret Thatcher’s political assault course. Thatcher took no prisoners; Major, or so it initially seemed during a sure-footed period before his election victory in 1992, removed the need for a prison. In 1991 a leading political journalist tried to cut Thatcher’s political
reputation down to size:
Large claims were made for Mrs Margaret Thatcher as a great Prime Minister: but they are melting before our eyes like the snows of spring. My prediction is that history will judge her as just above average, below C. R. Attlee and H. H. Asquith, who has better claims than she to being a great peacetime Prime Minister, but above Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson.1
