Thatcher Becomes PM: Britain's Iron Lady Rises

Britain's Winter of Discontent did the campaigning for her. Rubbish piled uncollected in Leicester Square, the dead went unburied in Liverpool, and picket lines blocked hospital entrances. When voters went to the polls on May 3, 1979, they delivered a 44-seat majority to the Conservative Party and made Margaret Thatcher the first woman to serve as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Thatcher had won the Conservative leadership in 1975 by challenging former Prime Minister Edward Heath, whom the party's establishment considered unbeatable. A grocer's daughter from Grantham who had studied chemistry at Oxford before becoming a tax barrister, she brought a conviction politics style that alarmed Tory moderates. Her economic views drew heavily from Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and she made no effort to disguise her contempt for the postwar consensus of managed decline. The Labour government under James Callaghan had struggled with inflation running above 15 percent, powerful trade unions that could paralyze essential services, and a humiliating IMF bailout in 1976. The winter strikes of 1978-79, involving refuse collectors, truck drivers, and public sector workers, made the government appear helpless. Callaghan's decision not to call an autumn election proved fatal. Thatcher took office on May 4, 1979, and quoted Francis of Assisi on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street: "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony." The harmony never materialized. Her government immediately raised interest rates to combat inflation, cut public spending, and began dismantling the nationalized industries that had defined British economic life since 1945. Over the next eleven years, Thatcher privatized British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, and dozens of other state-owned enterprises, broke the power of the mining unions in a year-long strike, and fought a war to reclaim the Falkland Islands. She won three consecutive elections and reshaped British politics so thoroughly that her successors in both parties governed within the framework she established.