ABSTRACT
Although the tide of postwar politics had already started to turn in the 1970s, it is seldom that one can date political change with the precision of a single day. For it was on Thursday 3rd May 1979, with the election of the first of the Thatcher Administrations, that Britain finally decided to part company with the assumptions and beliefs on which the postwar political edifice had been built. Such has been the primacy of the leader that the following decade was shaped by ideas and policies that assumed the name of ‘Thatcherism’.
