To mark the passing of Baroness Thatcher who died earlier this week, I am posting a section from my book Second That Emotion which addresses her legacy as well as her ultimate fall from power.

When Margaret Thatcher became the first female leader of a major political party in the United Kingdom—after unseating former Conservative Party Prime Minister Ted Heath—and then won a national election to become Britain’s first woman prime minister in 1979, she didn’t so much break the glass ceiling as demolish the entire building.
Thatcher was the daughter of a middle-class grocer from the largely forgotten town of Grantham, in the middle-eastern region of England. Bright and ambitious, she went to Oxford University, became a barrister (lawyer) before entering politics and being elected to the UK Parliament in 1959, where she represented the North London district of Finchley. She rose up through the party ranks to become education secretary before ultimately challenging and defeating the then leader and former prime minister Ted Heath, and becoming leader of the Conservative Party in 1974. The notion of a woman prime minister at that time was unusual enough, but for a middle-class woman from Grantham to ascend to the leadership of the oldest and most elitist political party in Britain—whose former leaders had included William Pitts, Benjamin Disraeli, Sir Winston Churchill, and Sir Anthony Eden—was an extraordinary achievement in itself.
People only tend to embrace dramatic change in times of crisis, and Britain’s economy and the resulting unrest at the time certainly warranted that label. The so-called “winter of discontent,” in the United Kingdom in 1978–79, with the resulting labor strikes, sky-high taxation, and record unemployment under the Labour government of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, opened the door for dramatic change and reform, paving the way for Thatcher’s Conservative Party to win the 1979 election and make her Britain’s first woman prime minister.
A series of historic events and memorable statements, and a nickname that stuck, helped to define the nature of the social contract that the British people established with Margaret Thatcher—as the basis for the culture shift that came to be known as Thatcherism. She was Maggie, the “Iron Lady” who stared down the powerful miner’s union, stood up to the mighty Soviets alongside President Reagan, liberated the Falkland Islands from Argentina, survived a brutal assassination attempt by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in a Brighton hotel, and “handbagged” the mostly male members of parliament and her cabinet into submission.

One of her famous handbags recently sold for almost forty thousand dollars in June 2011 at a London charity auction. She once famously commented that, “If you want something said, ask a man, but of you want something done, ask a woman.” Whatever your political persuasion, you cannot but acknowledge that Margaret Thatcher was a formidable political operator.
She was an ordinary yet extraordinary woman, who rose to the apex of national and world politics by being true to her conservative principles and following her version of the economics of common sense—which she spoke to in a way that the average family sitting around the kitchen table could understand. She was utterly intractable and her famous comment at the 1980 Conservative Party conference helped define her for a decade in power: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning!”
Thatcher’s social contract stated: Maggie is one of us made good. She took on the elitists and the militants at home and beat them. She stared down the communists and the IRA. She rescued the Falkland Islands and put the economy back on track. She isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but she’s our Iron Lady, so don’t mess with her.
By 1983 the UK economy had begun to turn around, with stronger growth, lower inflation, and reduced mortgage rates. But Thatcherism wasn’t working for everyone in the United Kingdom: manufacturing output dropped by 30 percent from five years earlier and unemployment reached record levels. Indeed, Thatcherism rep- resented a British version of trickle-down economics, and for the poor and those on the lowest rung of the societal ladder, it was less of a trickle and more of a slow drip.
The illogical leap for the lower and lower-middle classes in the United Kingdom was that someone with a staunchly conservative viewpoint who was committed to the privatization of industry and the resultant reduction in manufacturing, who had been educated in one of England’s most elite universities, and had demonstrated that she didn’t view tackling growing unemployment as a priority, should be a friend of the working man and woman. But the nature of social contracts has always been illogical, and Thatcher’s entrenched image as someone who “took on the establishment” convinced ordinary people that she was indeed a kindred spirit, despite much evidence to the contrary.
Within Thatcher’s own party and her own cabinet there had always been muted voices of resentment against some of her policies and particularly her brusque style of leadership. She was highly skeptical of European integration in all its forms—and particularly economic integration, which she believed had the potential to undermine British sovereignty—and she had become somewhat of a caricature for many with her power suits, her carefully cultivated low speaking voice, and her use of the “royal” we in referring to herself. There were even whispers that Queen Elizabeth II had taken exception to her perceived image as a sort of alternate monarch. However, because of the power of Thatcher’s social contract with the British people, Margaret Thatcher never lost a national election, although at times her polling numbers during the midterm periods dipped below that of her party.
In 1990, Thatcher’s long-serving cabinet minister, Sir Geoffrey Howe, resigned over a disagreement about entry into the European monetary system, and in his resignation speech Howe made a damning statement about Thatcher’s style of leadership—using a cricket analogy to suggest she had “broken her players’ bats before sending them out to play.” Michael Heseltine, a self-made millionaire and former cabinet minister who had held the positions of secretary of state for both the environment and defense, had subsequently resigned from Thatcher’s government over frequent dis- agreements with her. Heseltine was a charismatic figure who was seen by many within the conservative movement as a more “suitable” leader in waiting, and after Howe’s resignation, Heseltine took the opportunity to challenge Thatcher—boosted by polling numbers that suggested he would be a more popular leader going into the 1992 election.
The nature of a social contract is such that it’s the people that both establish the contract and set the terms, not the other way around. Thatcher’s supporters may have been tiring of her style of leadership and sought a new direction and a fresh face, but she was still their Iron Lady and it was they who would vote to decide when it was time for her to go—just as they had done with Churchill after World War II—and not a small clique of Conservative Party members of Parliament.
Heseltine was popular and a talented leader, but for him to be seen to have unseated Thatcher, rather than the people who put her there left them feeling disenfranchised and angry, and they let the Conservative members of Parliament know it in no uncertain terms. The result was that although Thatcher was forced to step down after failing to defeat Heseltine in the leadership contest. Ultimately, however, Heseltine was defeated in the next ballot by the compromise candidate John Major—who with Thatcher’s endorsement went on to succeed her and ultimately win the 1992 election.
Perhaps the ultimate loser of the coup against Margaret Thatcher was the Conservative Party itself. The party’s failure to understand the true nature of the social contract that the British people had established with Margaret Thatcher resulted in the Conservative Party losing not one but two strong leaders. And while John Major was able to scrape a narrow victory at the national election in 1992, at the following election in 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour Party tossed the Conservatives out of power in a landslide victory.Successive Labour governments then governed until 2010, when a repackaged Conservative Party under David Cameron, in coalition with Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, regained power.
Ordinary voters are the creators and owners of the social contract, deciding not just the terms but also when it is time to end the contract—and in failing to understand that, the Conservatives paid a heavy price in the political wilderness for thirteen long years.