Carrying the Country First

An excellent post from Blimpish, making the point that while Labour governments tend to be elected with great enthusiasm, voters are usually more cautious when choosing Conservative ministries. It was only in 1983 that Thatcher won her landslide (Reagan, of course, emulated her example in 1984). And as he says, you don’t need to win your party (completely) to win the country:

Thatcher’s latter-day hero-worshippers may believe the British people enthusiastically embraced the full-blooded Thatcherite agenda of sound money, free markets, union-busting, etc. But it wasn’t the case; leaving aside that what became ‘Thatcherism’ didn’t really exist in 1979, inasmuch as it was articulated, people were generally sceptical – after all, Heath, Wilson and Callaghan had all promised to quell the unions and kill inflation…