Margaret thatcher how many elections

Why the Tories won: Attlee misjudged the date of the election and his government seemed exhausted. The Tories, though, adopted a moderate tone. After Churchill retired, his successor, Sir Anthony Eden, called a snap general election, winning a comfortable seat majority. Rationing was over, the economy was booming and the Tories coasted to victory on the back of prosperity. Labour, with the year-old Attlee still at the helm, were bitterly divided between leftwing Bevanites and centrist Gaitskellites, and the result was never seriously in doubt.

Ironically, though, Eden only lasted another 18 months, resigning because of ill health after the debacle of the Suez Crisis. Why the Tories won: Voters were beginning to enjoy postwar prosperity, while the new Conservative prime minister cut an enormously popular and attractive figure. The election was another non-event. Though Labour fought a slick campaign, their new leader, Hugh Gaitskell, remained a controversial figure inside his own party. After the Tories won their third successive election with a seat majority, some commentators wondered whether rising affluence would make it impossible for Labour to win again.

Why the Tories won: Living standards continued to soar and the electorate saw no need to change horses, from Conservative to Labour, in midstream. Macmillan had resigned the year before; his successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was a plodding, uninspiring figure, and many people expected the smart, technocratic Wilson to win comfortably. But after Home staged a late comeback, Wilson won with only a narrow five-seat majority. After governing for almost 18 months with a wafer-thin majority, Wilson went to the country to secure a bigger mandate.

The economic picture was bright, the government seemed united and the Conservatives had just dumped Home for the relatively little-known Edward Heath. Voters felt that he should have the chance to govern with a proper working majority. The final years of the s, dominated by a humiliating devaluation of the pound and a rift with the trade unions, had been damaging for Wilson.

Even so, he was widely expected to stroll to victory against the lacklustre Heath in the sunshine of But complacency proved his undoing. Why the Tories won: Economic bad news reawakened memories of the late s, and while Edward Heath channelled a kind of underdog spirit, Wilson seemed oddly complacent. The election was fought against a bleak backdrop, with the economy in meltdown.

When the Liberals refused to prop him up, Heath resigned, and Wilson returned with a minority Labour government. Why no one won: Hung parliament: voters blamed Heath for the economic chaos blighting the nation, while Labour seemed too divided to take full advantage. Having given the miners the pay rise they wanted, Wilson called the second general election of the year in an attempt to secure a working majority.

It was another grim, gloomy election, dominated by reports of the IRA bombing campaign on the British mainland. Heath tried to whip up public support for a government of national unity, but the polls were always against him. After a slick campaign promising to rebuild the economy, Thatcher won a seat majority.

This second attempt to bridge the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will succeed, dramatically altering world trade as well as the physical and geopolitical landscape of Central At Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, a bomb is thrown at a squad of policemen attempting to break up what had begun as a peaceful labor rally. The police responded with wild gunfire, killing several people in the crowd and injuring dozens more.

The demonstration, which drew Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. On May 4, , in Kent, Ohio, 28 National Guardsmen fire their weapons at a group of anti-war demonstrators on the Kent State University campus, killing four students, wounding eight, and permanently paralyzing another. The tragedy was a watershed moment for a nation divided by The agreement was made in accordance with the Oslo Accords, signed in Washington, D.

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After Thatcher was elected to a third term in , her government lowered income tax rates to a postwar low. On November 14, , former Defense Minister Michael Heseltine challenged her for leadership of the party, partly due to differences of opinion on the European Union.

Thatcher won the first ballot but by too small of a margin for outright victory. That night, her cabinet members visited her one by one and urged her to resign. She officially stepped down on November 28 after helping to assure that John Major and not Heseltine would replace her. Thatcher remained in parliament until , at which time she entered the largely ceremonial House of Lords and began to write her memoirs.

Though she stopped appearing in public after suffering a series of small strokes in the early s, her influence remained strong.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Born Margaret Hilda Roberts, the future prime minister was the daughter of a grocer and local alderman who later became mayor of Grantham, England. Businesses were failing, and inflation and unemployment were rising.

Thatcher immediately set out to turn the economic situation around, Britain's first female prime minister was facing sharp criticism from both her cabinet and the public in response to her Cultural anthropologist and writer Margaret Meade was born in Philadelphia and graduated from Barnard College in Appointed assistant curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in , she embarked on two dozen trips to the South Pacific to Margaret Taylor was an American first lady and the wife of Zachary Taylor, an American military hero and the 12th president of the United States.

Margaret supported her husband throughout his long military career, repeatedly uprooting her family to follow Queen Elizabeth II has since served as reigning monarch of the United Kingdom England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and numerous other realms and territories, as well as head of the Commonwealth, the group of 53 sovereign nations that includes many former British The Wars of the Roses were a series of bloody civil wars for the throne of England between two competing royal families: the House of York and the House of Lancaster, both members of the age-old royal Plantagenet family.