Volume 40, Number 20 · December 2, 1993

Yes, Minister

By Alan Ryan
The Downing Street Years
by Margaret Thatcher

HarperCollins, 914 pp., $30.00

On May 4, 1979, Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister of Great Britain. When she resigned—aptly enough, on Thanks-giving Day, Thursday, November 22, 1990—she had held office for eleven and a half years: longer than any prime minister since Lord Salisbury almost a hundred years before, and the longest consecutive term since Lord Liverpool at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nor did she go gladly or gracefully after all those years; her colleagues and her party had had enough of her, but her appetite for power was unslaked, as anyone who saw her performance in the No Confidence debate the afternoon of her resignation will remember.



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