ABSTRACT
Mrs Thatcher entered Downing Street in May 1979 committed to a policy of economic and social transformation. For the next eleven years she dominated British politics more completely than any other prime minister of the twentieth century. There were periods in which she was vulnerable, but special circumstances gave her an apparently irresistible momentum which carried her through two further general election victories. In 1983 she won a majority of 144 seats, which she followed up in 1987 with a third successive win, this time by 102 seats. She interpreted these results as a mandate to maintain a course which was so radical as to make some observers refer to the ‘Thatcher revolution’, a phrase which has aroused considerable controversy.
