Margaret Thatcher

The Conservative Party's landslide victory in Great Britain's general election on June 11, 1987, gave Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the keys to 10 Downing Street for the third consecutive time. Not since Robert Hanks Jenkinson, the second Lord Liverpool, won three successive elections in the 1820s had a British prime minister accomplished a political victory of this magnitude. By climbing to the top of the greasy pole- as Benjamin Disraeli once phrased it- for the third straight time, Thatcher achieved a personal electoral victory which had eluded the grasp of the giants of British political history. Neither Disraeli nor William Gladstone in the nineteenth century nor David Lloyd George, Herbert Asquith, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, or Harold Wilson in the twentieth century ever presided over three consecutive party victories.

Without question, the decade of the 1980s in Great Britain was the era of Margaret Thatcher . Thatcher dominated British politics and government in a fashion not witnessed since Churchill's leadership of Britain during World War II. Furthermore, it now appears that Thatcher has emerged as the most influential European leader since Charles de Gaulle. Thatcher's economic and social philosophy, her personal determination and shrewdness, and her political instincts combined to make her a political phenomenon in Britain.

The 1987 British general election was a referendum on eight years of Thatcherism and conservative government. In that respect, Margaret Thatcher 's third triumph differed markedly from the Conservative Party's victory in 1979 and its smashing reelection in 1983. Thatcher and the Tories swept into power in 1979 against the backdrop of economic crisis, characterized by the so-called Winter of Discontent of 1978-79. In the late 1970s, high inflation, trade union arrogance and violence, and a social malaise infected the British body politic. Britain was rightfully viewed as the pathetic "sick man" of Europe and political commentators in both Europe and the United States referred contemptuously to the "British Disease," that combination of lagging economic productivity, inefficient burgeoning state bureaucracy, social decadence, and political gridlock. Upon taking office as Britain's first female prime minister, Thatcher realized that her most pressing task involved finding a cure for the British Disease and thereby rescuing Britain from the prospect of a nation headed for terminal decline.

Margaret Thatcher 's efforts to find a remedy for the British Disease initially failed quite conspicuously. The conservative economic policies that Thatcher and the Tory government pursued in the early 1980s were phenomenally unsuccessful. Inflation in Britain reached almost 22 percent in 1980 and by the beginning of 1982 unemployment stood at three million. In fact, Thatcherism became a pejorative political term during the early 1980s, a code word for an economic policy that produced only marginal success in controlling inflation while at the same time bringing higher unemployment and low economic growth. Americans may even remember David Stockman's warning to President-elect Ronald Reagan in late 1980 not to follow the tight money policies of the British prime minister, or Thatcherism would surely result in America.