ABSTRACT
Educated at Kesteven and Grantham Girls Grammar School and Somerville College, Oxford. She also tended to bypass Whitehall mandarins, many of them sceptical of the proposed assault upon consensus politics, by turning her private office into an entourage of trusted counsellors. A visit to Belfast as Minister of Defence confirmed the opinion of one of Thatcher's more exotic admirers 'that it is hopeless. The catastrophic scale of the Major government's defeat in the general election of 1997 revealed not only the damage she had done to her party in fracturing it, particularly over Europe, by her combative style, but also the fragility of her credo. By enabling the Labour party to embrace market communitarianism she assisted the left: to relocate to a position where it could convey the values of a majority which, though largely silent in the 1980s, had rarely been enamoured of Thatcherism.
