Blackwell Reference Online

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British Prime Minister (1979–90). Elected as a Conservative MP in 1959, she was education minister in heath's government from 1970 to 1974. She ousted him as party and opposition leader in 1975, and then became the UK's first woman prime minister after winning the 1979 election. Further victories in 1983 and 1987 enabled her to record the longest continuous tenure by any twentieth-century British premier. Among the others who have served since 1945, only Clement Attlee rivals her scale of impact upon the course of national policy. In domestic politics Thatcherism became synonymous with a radical conservatism that championed privatization, sapped trade union power, promoted monetarism over Keynesianism (see keynes ), and generally challenged the state-centered welfarism that had pervaded British politics since the Attlee era of the late 1940s. Internationally, after defeating Argentina in the Falklands War of 1982, she developed a close rapport with US President Reagan. As a forceful personality who relished her public image as “iron lady,” Thatcher eagerly assisted his efforts to hasten the collapse of communist hegemony in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Eventual success there meant that she also contributed more to german reunification than she ever intended. Her anxiety on that issue was all of a piece with her growing hostility towards the form being taken by ... log in or subscribe to read full text