Today, October 13, marks 100 years since Margaret Thatcher’s birth. First becoming prime minister in 1979, she led her British Conservative Party to three consecutive electoral victories, making her the longest-tenured resident of 10 Downing Street in the twentieth century. Her impact far exceeded her longevity, though, as she led transformative administrations fundamentally reconfiguring the politics and economics of her nation. The “postwar consensus,” which had seen government spending marching steadily upward and great swathes of industry nationalized, was comprehensively dismantled. Under Thatcher, Britain became a land of free markets and deregulation.
Disgust with socialism at home was matched by her opposition to communism abroad, rendering her a vocal Cold Warrior. Indeed, a hardline speech against Soviet behavior in 1975 led the Red Army’s propaganda paper to dismiss her with the nickname the “Iron Lady,” a moniker more accurate than they could have realized. By the time she left the global stage, most of her enemies within and without—trade union socialists, Argentinian generals, Soviet commissars—lay prostrate before her. Margaret Thatcher was arguably the most consequential female politician in the last century. Yet, as I chronicle in Forging the Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, the 1970s, and the Origins of Neoliberalism, her rise to national power and global prominence was both an unpredictable and unlikely outcome.
Her ascent must be understood in the times in which it occurred, for the United Kingdom in the 1970s was a mess. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger lamented to President Gerald Ford, “Britain is a tragedy—it has sunk to begging, borrowing, and stealing until North Sea oil comes in.” Long-term economic underperformance against healthier continental countries like France and West Germany produced relative decline. Britain had become “the sick man of Europe.” The global economic downturn at the end of the postwar boom rendered these maladies far more acute, manifesting in rising inflation and industrial unrest.
Crisis followed upon crisis. Edward Heath’s Conservative government (1970–74) faced rampant industrial action, including a coal miners’ strike that shut down power generation and forced industry onto a three-day week. The “lights going out” remains an illuminative metaphor for the entire decade. The Conservatives ran on a manifesto implying a less interventionist, anti-collectivist approach. Faced with a sea of troubles, Heath reversed course—his “U-turns”—jacking up spending and subsidizing industry. It did him no good. Growth came, only to be wiped out by rising inflation (“stagflation”), and a second miners’ strike was called in 1974. To break that strike, Heath called a snap “Who governs Britain?” election, which he promptly lost.
His replacement, Harold Wilson and the Labour Party, fared little better. A “Social Contract” promising more government benefits to workers in exchange for industrial peace drove spending to its peacetime peak. Inflation soon followed, hitting 25 percent in 1975. The next year saw a financing crisis, necessitating an appeal to the IMF for an emergency loan. Labour, now led by Jim Callaghan, had to accept deep spending cuts. With each new calamity, the system seemed more paralytic; the country was becoming “ungovernable,” regardless of whether the Conservatives or Labour was in charge.
During the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher changed from being an improbable national leader to her taking her first steps in becoming the Iron Lady of our historical imagination.
Economic crisis begets political opportunity. That Thatcher would emerge with the laurels, becoming Tory leader in 1975 and prime minister by 1979, would have been considered the longest of shots to any analyst at the start of the decade. A 1967 Sunday Times assessment of future party leaders put her odds at 1000-1. She entered Ted Heath’s Cabinet as Secretary of State for Education in 1970. However, education is not one of the great offices of state, and she remained largely invisible to most voters. Visibility came, albeit in an unwelcome manner, from tabloid-driven accusations of cruelly cutting school milk programs. She became a household name: “Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher.”
Better opportunities eventually followed, and Thatcher made the most of them. With few skilled communicators among their front ranks, she was drafted to be a key spokesperson for the Conservatives’ October 1974 election campaign, bringing some life to an otherwise gloomy affair. Shortly thereafter, she was tapped to lead opposition to the government’s Finance Bill, where she combined detailed dissections of Labour’s economic proposals with rhetorical bravado. To Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, she declared: “Some chancellors are macroeconomic. Other chancellors are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap. … If this chancellor can be chancellor, anyone in this House of Commons could be chancellor!” Roars of approval arose from Tory backbench MPs, who finally saw somebody fighting back successfully after the disappointments of the Heath years.
Indeed, the greatest thing she had going for her was having Edward Heath as her opponent. Heath lost three out of the four elections as leader. It was time for him to go, a reality recognized by almost everyone. Except Ted Heath. His refusal to step aside forced a leadership campaign. It also froze many likely contenders, especially William Whitelaw, his most obvious replacement, who remained loyal to Heath and did not want to stand against him.
Heath’s caustic personality had long ago alienated many of his own MPs. Placating disgruntled MPs through patronage or promotion was a shabby political art he thought beneath him. Beyond the personal, sticking with Heath also meant continuing a technocratic, value-light, status quo-oriented politics he represented. Others were pitching a new approach of smaller taxes, reduced spending, and economic deregulation. That proved a more appealing offer to many Tory MPs.
Thatcher, however, was not the obvious alternative; that was Sir Keith Joseph, who had served alongside Thatcher in the previous government, where they bonded as political kindred spirits. Defeat set him to profound soul-searching, at the end of which he decided that he was not a conservative at all. He had acquiesced in the steady advance of socialism in the postwar years. His personal self-reflection also fell on his party, and the Heath Government in particular. Real change was needed. Through a well-publicized speech campaign in 1974, he laid out this critique and positioned himself as the voice of the discontented Tory right wing. Joseph, alas, went one speech too far, raising questions during a speech on social welfare as to the health of “our human stock,” a whiff of eugenics that scuttled his chances.
When Joseph informed Thatcher he was withdrawing from the leadership contest, she stepped in, “because someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand.” Even then, few saw her as a strong contender. The Economist described her as, “Precisely the sort of candidate that ought to be able to stand, and lose, harmlessly.” MP Airey Neave, who hated Heath with a burning intensity, organized a successful campaign playing on Heath’s failings among his colleagues and implying Thatcher did not have enough votes anyway, so why not send Ted a message? It worked perfectly. She ousted him in the first round and then fended off other challengers in the second. In February 1975, Margaret Thatcher became the first woman leader of any major UK political party.
Winning the leadership did not mean she had full control over the party. The majority of the Shadow Cabinet were One Nation Tory moderates like Jim Prior and Ian Gilmour, who were closer to Heath, and her position as leader was insufficiently secure to see them off. Tory moderates believed the postwar consensus and the drift toward bigger government were simply the reality to which the party must adapt. Nor did they see the prior Conservative government as a failure. Heath had a run of bad luck and misguidedly tried to challenge the unions. Court the moderate voters who defected to the Liberals in 1974, and they would be back in office in no time. The party needed to be offering comforting words, assurances of stability, not fire-breathing radicalism.
Thatcher and her allies, however, believed they had no choice; continuing the status quo meant further decline. Divisions within the party proved a roadblock to the articulation of new policies. On the most pressing issues of that decade—how to fight inflation and how to handle the unions—the moderates and Thatcherites fought for several years to a draw. The major policy documents of the time were studies in obfuscation.
The chaotic ‘70s created political opportunities for many politicians, but faced with crises, others crumbled where Thatcher did not.
Success came by bringing outsiders into the discussion, mainly via the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank established by Joseph. Among the most important of these were John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, authors of the “Stepping Stones” strategy. Winning the next election, they argued, was not enough; the Conservatives had to induce a “sea-change in Britain’s political economy.” Voters had to reject socialism and support transformative regeneration, which meant grappling with the main obstacle to economic reform: the unions.
The party establishment thought all of this was dangerous nonsense. Chairman Peter Thorneycroft ordered that every copy of “Stepping Stones” be burned. Thatcher, Joseph, and crucially Whitelaw, supported it; on the other hand, these ideas were woven into Conservative policy, providing focus and clarity when events eventually broke their way.
Break their way they did with the “Winter of Discontent,” the wave of strikes sweeping the country in 1978–79. The Callaghan Government combatted inflation through an incomes policy, seeking to hold wage growth below inflation. With real wages declining for several years, workers finally rebelled. Strike followed upon strike throughout a frigid winter, the inconveniences, disruptions, and misery piling up upon the public. Petrol ran out, food went undelivered, hospitals shut down, bodies went unburied, and, yet again, the lights went out. Callaghan’s government also froze, unable to formulate a coherent response to the chaos.
The political space for transformative politics was thus opened. Thatcher could now properly articulate her vision, moving her party definitively to the right and taking a much harder line against the unions. Politics in the ‘70s dismayed so many because so many leaders seemed incapable of managing the nation’s problems. Voters saw in Thatcher a firm hand on the tiller. By the spring of 1979, the next election was never really in doubt.
At multiple points in this narrative, Thatcher’s advance could have been easily halted, reducing her to a historical footnote. She might have been booted from office over the “milk snatcher” row, condemned to rebuild her position from the backbenches. Had Heath more self-awareness, he might have voluntarily stepped aside to allow one of his favored alternatives to become leader. Had Joseph been more reserved in his rhetoric, he would have been the one to challenge Heath. Had Jim Callaghan called for an election before the “Winter of Discontent,” which he seriously contemplated, the Conservatives might well have lost, and Thatcher would have been unlikely to remain leader.
We know, of course, this is not how the story ends. During the 1970s, through the interplay of events and opportunities, Margaret Thatcher changed from being an improbable national leader to her taking her first steps in becoming the Iron Lady of our historical imagination. However, this is not a tale of mere chance and good fortune. Thatcher rightfully remains the central figure by putting herself into a position to take advantage of chances when they arose, actually earning the nickname the Soviets had already gifted her by demonstrating courage and conviction in situations of genuine political danger. At the same time, she was also a skilled pragmatist, conceding when she could not win, all the while not losing sight of the goal.
Thatcher tempered her remarkable courage and conviction with patience and persistence. The chaotic ‘70s created political opportunities for many politicians, but faced with crises, others crumbled where Thatcher did not. She possessed the skill, acumen, and resolve needed to take advantage of the moment and assert control, leading her into Downing Street and on the path to great accomplishments.