ABSTRACT
Margaret Thatcher was the only twentieth-century prime minister to become eponymous. The use of the term 'Thatcherism' might be taken to imply a more or less coherent body of thought or ideology, much as well-established terms such as 'liberalism', 'Marxism' or, indeed, 'Conservatism' do. The importance of Thatcherism, therefore, lay not in the novelty of its ideas but in their operation in the late 1970s and 1980s. Thatcher extracted maximum benefit from the fact that she was not an orthodox political 'insider' at a time when 'insider politics' was coming under increasingly hostile scrutiny. Thatcher allied herself with free-market Conservatives on the right of the Tory party. Sir Keith Joseph articulated a coherent critique of what was known as 'consensus politics' and advocated most of the economic policies that later became known as distinctively Thatcherite.
