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...points. Hobbled by a platform that many voters found impossibly ambitious and disturbingly leftist, Labor conducted a campaign in which almost nothing went right. Foot and Deputy Leader Denis Healey, 65, wrangled publicly over details of the party's controversial disarmament policies. That dispute had barely ended when former Prime Minister Callaghan, 71, revived it by disagreeing with them both. Then while Foot was striving to dispel the notion that he was a tired and ineffective leader, his wife, Feminist Writer Jill Craigie, was quoted as saying that her husband would step down soon after the election to make...
Labor switched strategies constantly, from highlighting disarmament to stressing unemployment to attacking Thatcher's bossy style. On the last point, the Prime Minister certainly gave Labor ample ammunition: twice she publicly reprimanded Foreign Secretary Pym, once when he suggested that too large...
...Labor fumbled even the issue of Thatcher's style. In a disastrous miscalculation, Healey blasted her conduct of the Falklands war, characterizing her as a "Prime Minister who glories in slaughter." That intemperate criticism was roundly condemned by politicians and press alike, and even Foot distanced himself from the remarks...
Thatcher campaigned like a politician fighting to save her career, even though victory seemed so certain that London bookmakers stopped taking bets on the outcome five days before the election. Hearing the rumblings of a landslide, the Prime Minister was striving not just I for an improvement on her 34-seat majority in Parliament but for a colossal improvement. Yet not all Tory supporters favored an earth-moving triumph. In an editorial headlined A TORY VICTORY, YES, A LANDSLIDE, NO, the Sunday Times reminded readers that voting for Alliance candidates in marginal districts could keep a Conservative triumph within bounds...
...large part, Thatcher owes the size of the verdict to her handling of a colonial conflict on a sprinkle of islands 8,000 miles from home. Only a few months before the Argentines took the Falkland Islands in April of last year, the Prime Minister's approval rating in the polls stood at 25%, the lowest of any British leader since World War II. Once war broke out, her unflinching determination to bring victory back from the South Atlantic stamped Thatcher permanently in the public mind as the bold, decisive leader she had always wanted...