Margaret Thatcher's Turnover Essay

My proposed field of research concerns Margaret Thatcher, The Falklands War and the 1983 General Election. In the early months of 1982 a poll was conducted into how the public viewed the job that Margaret Thatcher was doing as Prime Minister, with the results showing that only 25% of people were satisfied with her, thus making her one of the most unpopular Prime Ministers ever. Despite these disastrous poll results, Thatcher managed a complete turnaround and, in the June 1983 General Election succeeded in leading the Conservative party to a victory that returned home a majority of 144 seats, a landslide. My research will concern whether the Falklands War, a conflict that took place in the intervening months and boosted Thatcher’s popularity,
Furthermore, according to David Sanders, Hugh Ward and David Marsh, the Falklands Conflict is: ‘In Popular Discourse, the favoured explanation for this transformation.’ Indeed, all the authors on this period of history give the Falklands at least some credit for Thatcher’s transformation and many of them believe the ‘Falklands Factor’ to be the overriding influence in the turnaround. In his discussion on ‘Thatcherism’ Eric Evans describes The Falklands Factor as the ‘single most important factor in the large Conservative election victory of 1983.’ One of Thatcher’s biographers, John Campbell declares that: ‘with the successful conclusion of the Falkland’s War… (Thatcher) could now look forward to almost certain re-election.’ Andrew Marr goes as far as giving almost total credit to the Falklands Factor in the turnaround and subsequent election victory. Although he does briefly mention other relevant factors, he does not go into great detail about them. A weakness in Marr’s work is that his book is a more general text looking at a wider period of history and so he has perhaps not researched this topic in as much depth as other writers and may miss some important nuances to the