ABSTRACT
Margaret Thatcher’s political career was extraordinary. She remains Britain’s only woman prime minister. The eleven and a half years (May 1979 to November 1990) during which she was in No. 10 Downing Street were comfortably longer than anyone else achieved in the twentieth century. She was also prime minister 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, the last two with landslide majorities. No other party leader in the last century won more than two successively and then with smaller majorities overall. Although it is still too early to be sure, the claims of Thatcher’s supporters that she changed the course of British history cannot be lightly dismissed as heroine-worship or as grandiose posturing. At the very least, she cast a long – opponents would say baleful – shadow across both political parties into the twenty-first century. Controversial and partisan as she was, she also changed the mindset of the nation. Change as moral crusade was 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 that many of her detractors say she would like to have delivered 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
