. It was undoubtedly an act of great courage and it worked, though at the cost of much manufacturing capacity and still more social hardship. Victory in the Falklands the following year guaranteed her reelection unopposed in 1983 (Kinsley 51-52)?
Her second term was characterized chiefly by rudderless improvisation, a period of accident and error, the chief of which was the Westland affair, in which she allowed a relatively minor dispute over the award of a helicopter contract to be blown out of proportion by leaks and countercharges in the press. The result was the resignation of the Minister of Defense, Michael Heseltine, the only man in Thatcher's cabinet whose fearlessness and ambition came close to matching her own. Although she by then reigned victorious over her colleagues after purging her successive cabinet dissidents, she remained curiously vulnerable. A consequence of being dominant was that failures as well as successes were laid only at her door. Her true apotheosis dates from her third electoral victory in 1987, for only then could she know that she had changed the course of history. Thatcher has had numerous real achievements in Britain, but one must distinguish them from the myth of moral theology which had come to surround them. But in the end, the key to Thatcher's success is probably the failure of others. It was the failure of non-Conservative opinion to modernize and organize itself rather than the impossibility of such opinion ever speaking for the British majority, which enabled the Thatcherite experiment to succeed. The "Thatcher revolution" was not strictly necessary. And there are many signs that Thatcher may fall soon, and fall hard ("Britain: Thinking the Unthinkable" 63-64).
Since the celebration on May 4, 1989, of the tenth anniversary of her becoming Prime Minister, not much has gone right for Margaret Thatcher. By the end of 1989, the euphoric talk of an "economic miracle" that had fo...