Reflections on Margaret Thatcher’s shock victory 50 years ago this week in the leadership election that eventually led her to become Britain’s first woman prime minister

I was just 11 when Margaret Thatcher amazed the political world by ousting former prime minister Edward Heath to become Conservative party leader 50 years ago this week. But as a precocious schoolboy I was fascinated.

Even in 1975, it was hard to see how Heath could cling on to the leadership. He had lost two general elections in eight months the previous year. His four years as premier had been a series of crises, and when he called the first 1974 election with the question ‘Who governs Britain?’ the voters refused to give Ted Heath’s Tories as the answer. (A hung parliament was the messy outcome.) And he was extraordinarily rude to his colleagues – people he needed to vote for him.

Thatcher had been a largely invisible middle ranking cabinet minister – apart from earning infamy as the ‘milk snatcher‘ after abolishing free milk for primary school children. But after the successive 1974 Tory election defeats she became far more prominent. Thatcher made the headlines in the second 1974 election with a plan to abolish the rates, the tax that funded local councils, and to cut the cost of home loans. As the 1975 leadership campaign unfolded, she brilliantly led the Conservative response to Labour’s finance bill, showing a mastery of detail. Thatcher also dissed the performance of the Heath government, telling the Daily Telegraph, ‘People believe too many Conservatives have become socialists already’. (An uncanny preview of right wing criticisms of the Johnson and Sunak governments almost 50 years later.) Yet few saw her as a likely party leader.

Her campaign manager, Colditz escaper Airey Neave, leaked news that Thatcher was ahead of Heath in polling for the first leadership ballot. (They were the only two candidates at that stage.) He cleverly encouraged those who wanted to oust Heath to back her in the initial vote, as that was the only way they could get their preferred candidate into the race. Heath was humiliated by coming second to Thatcher and pulled out, beginning a 30 year ‘incredible sulk’ against Thatcher that lasted until he died in 2005.

The making of Maggie

To understand Margaret Thatcher, you have to understand her upbringing in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Charles Moore’s authorised biography (volume 1: Not for Turning) gives a fascinating insight into her childhood as Margaret Roberts. Even by the standards of the 1930s it seems joyless. Margaret’s older sister Muriel says ‘it was all church, church, church. We had an uncle every Christmas who sent us religious books. Oh how we hated it. You weren’t allowed to play games’. The girls’ mother seemed most to blame. One friend recalled a serious atmosphere in Margaret’s family home. Mr Roberts was a lay preacher and it seems likely that the future Mrs Thatcher inherited his sense of certainty and tendency to sermonise. Curiously, 11 year old Margaret won a silver medal for recitation at an eisteddfod in Grantham in 1937.

Val meets Maggie

Unlike most 11 years olds in 1975, I knew about Margaret Thatcher. Two years earlier, I saw her appear on Val Meets the VIPs, where Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton interviewed the then education secretary. In response to a question from a child in the audience, Thatcher said there would not be a woman PM in her lifetime. She went on to say:

I would not wish to be Prime Minister, dear. I have not enough experience for that job. The only full ministerial position I’ve held is Minister of Education and Science. Before you could even think of being Prime Minister, you’d need to have done a good deal more jobs than that.

The path to Number 10

Margaret Thatcher scored an extraordinary achievement in becoming the first female leader of a British political party. Yet it was far from inevitable that she would go on to become Britain’s first woman prime minister. Ironically, the appalling economic climate of the mid 1970s at first inhibited her. Harold Wilson’s Labour government, like Heath’s, introduced a pay policy to try to hold down wage increases at a time of rampant (26 percent) inflation. Thatcher’s free market instinct was that governments shouldn’t tell private companies what they could pay their workers. But she held her tongue, fearing that going on the offensive would be seen as irresponsible at a time of national crisis.

In these early years, Thatcher was often lacking in confidence, especially in the House of Commons, where the fading Wilson and later Jim Callaghan usually got the better of her. Callaghan in particular could be incredibly patronising. As her official biographer Charles Moore says, caution was always an important part of her character. The Times, indeed, noted that in her 1976 Tory conference speech, ‘Mrs Thatcher has moved with characteristic caution on to the middle ground of British politics’. She was often anxious in these early years, especially over what to wear when meeting Queen Elizabeth. One of her aides, Caroline Stephens, commented that, ‘The first thing you have got to bear in mind is that Mrs Thatcher is a very ordinary woman’. That’s not how anyone described her after a few years in power.

Winning the political battle of ideas

Like most British leaders, Margaret Thatcher was no intellectual. She was a woman of beliefs not ideas, yet she brilliantly adopted and advocated the ideas of right wing thinkers such the co-founders of the Centre for Policy Studies, Keith Joseph and Alfred Sherman. They campaigned for a reversal of the postwar consensus and urged curbs on trade union power, limits to state intervention and control of the amount of money in the economy to fight inflation. Eventually, this philosophy would lead to the sale of nationalised industries such as British Gas and British Telecom (BT). Charles Moore describes Thatcher as the most clamorous customer in the ideological market place, quoting her telling Chris Patten, ‘We have to win the battle of ideas in British politics’. Patten thought this was ‘a bit rum’. Then as now, the left had no compelling philosophy to counter the rise of the populist right.

A teacher and communicator

In the words of political commentator Steve Richards, Margaret Thatcher was a teacher. She sought to explain her mission in ways people could understand, even if they didn’t agree with it. She could put into simple words what she believed, and make her bold actions sound like common sense. Thatcher played on her experience as a housewife (ironic as she was actually always a working woman married to a millionaire) to argue that a nation had to live within its means just as a family couldn’t spend money it didn’t have. The analogy was misleading but powerful in the 1970s when governments had made a complete mess of running the economy. She had a way with words that only Tony Blair amongst her successors came close to matching. Thatcher also relished debate, and the opportunity to explain her actions in a way that’s totally alien to most of today’s politicians, who would run a mile from a forensic interview with Brian Walden or Robin Day.

Thatcher was often a lucky leader. An early stroke of luck was to be called the Iron Lady by the Soviet Red Army’s newspaper Red Star in early 1976. The Russians intended it as an insult, after she made a speech attacking them for being ‘bent on world dominance’, but Thatcher immediately saw the epithet as a powerful endorsement of her global significance as a defender of Western democracy.

Seizing the day

By 1978, prime minister Jim Callaghan’s crisis-riddled government seemed to be turning the corner. Inflation was falling, and Callaghan’s calm, sunny personality was widely respected compared with his shrill opponent. I remember on a visit to friends in Germany in October 1978 our host Werner asked us what we thought of Mrs Thatcher. Our family in unison complained that she was hectoring and shrill, and that we were not fans.

Thatcher was under considerable pressure as the Tory opinion poll lead vanished, and she abandoned her caution to take a populist line on immigration, which was a hot topic in the 1970s as now. In an ITV television interview in January 1978, Thatcher said British people feared they ‘may be swamped by people with a different culture … if there is any fear that [the British character] might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in’. Chris Patten, later one of her cabinet ministers and the last governor of Hong Kong, told Michael Portillo to ‘just imagine if she’d said we were being swamped by Jewish people’. The comments caused outrage. But they gave the Tories a poll boost, and persuaded Thatcher to ‘trust my own judgment in crucial matters’.

Jim Callaghan amazed the country by not calling a general election in the autumn of 1978. He was not convinced that he’d win and, unlike Rishi Sunak in 2024, decided to hold on in the hope that the economy would improve. The opposite happened. Callaghan tried to hold down wage increases in the hope of driving down inflation further, but his policy self destructed in spectacular fashion in the so-called winter of discontent, when a wave of strikes disrupted everyday life. The winter of 1978/79 was bitterly cold, and this added to the sense of despair and anger as grave diggers went on strike and rubbish piled up in the streets. Even Callaghan’s health minister David Ennals was targeted, as the war hero was treated as a ‘legitimate target’ by a shop steward when he went into Westminster hospital after his war wounds flared up. “His stay would be made as uncomfortable as possible’, boasted Jamie Morris. The reputation of British trade unions never recovered from the public and political backlash against their behaviour that winter.

Callaghan disastrously misjudged the mood on returning from a sunny Caribbean summit, and his complacent comments were famously characterised as ‘crisis, what crisis?’ by The Sun, although he never spoke those words. The winter of discontent hugely helped Margaret Thatcher, making her victory in the 1979 general election inevitable. She became Britain’s first woman prime minister on 4 May 1979.

I wrote about the Thatcher legacy after she died in April 2013, and also reflected on her turbulent first term more recently.