Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial figures in modern British history. No Prime Minister since Gladstone aroused such powerful emotions, or stirred such equal measures of hatred and veneration. For her admirers, she was ‘the greatest living Englishwoman’, a new Churchill who had reversed decline, defeated socialism and restored Britain’s place in the world. For her critics, she was a small-minded bigot, who destroyed British industry, widened inequality and unleashed a new era of greed and rampant individualism.

Yet if commentary on the Thatcher years is often very polarised, the period itself offers a nest of contradictions. Thatcher was the first Prime Minister since the Great Reform Act to win three general elections in a row; but the first since Neville Chamberlain to be evicted by her own party. She was the only Prime Minister of the twentieth century to give her name to an ideology, but there is no agreement on what it was or who believed in it. In electoral terms, she was the most successful party leader of the modern era, but she won a smaller share of the vote than any Conservative government since 1922, and fewer votes in absolute terms than her successor, John Major.