By the dismal end of the nineteen-seventies, a series of oil shocks had sent the economies of most of the world’s developed democracies into a tailspin. Their publics were not pleased. In country after country, voters voted out the ins and voted in the outs. Ideology didn’t seem to matter. In France, Spain, Sweden, and Greece, governing parties of the right and the center right were shown the door. In West Germany (as it still was), the Netherlands, Portugal, and, of course, the United States, it was incumbents of the left and the center left who got the hook.
An early beneficiary of this political turbulence was Margaret Thatcher, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, who swept to power in the general election of May 3, 1979, following the so-called Winter of Discontent. Her rise was as improbable as it was inexorable. In a party of reflexive male chauvinists, she was a woman. In a party traditionally dominated by landed aristocrats, rich industrialists, and upper-class twits of every stripe, she was a product of the striving middle class. Her predecessor as party leader and Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, had been indelibly dubbed “the Grocer” by the satirical magazine Private Eye. Though cruelly aimed at Heath’s status anxieties, the Eye’s gibe was rooted in his stint negotiating food prices in Brussels. Margaret Thatcher, however, was the actual daughter of an actual grocer, and proud of it. Finally, in a party riddled with “wets” who had accommodated themselves to Labour’s postwar welfare state, she was a doctrinaire free-market fundamentalist, a radical believer in the individualism of the successful, a despiser of “society” (“there is no such thing”) and social solidarity—a visionary, even a kind of revolutionary, and in temperament anything but conservative.
