Word: thatchers
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...Thatcher tidies her Cabinet, the opposition regroups...
Following a monthlong campaign whirl that ended with the thumping re-election of Margaret Thatcher, Britons could be forgiven last week for dearly wishing a respite from political news. It was not to be. Not only did the Prime Minister continue to tidy up her Cabinet, but a pair of opposition leaders, Laborite Michael Foot, 69, and the Social Democrat Roy Jenkins, 62, decided to call it quits. As members of the Liberal Party began grumbling about their alliance with the Social Democratic Party (S.D.P.), their popular chief, David Steel, hinted he might also bow out before the next election...
Meanwhile, Thatcher finished a Cabinet reshuffle she had begun immediately after the election, when she forced out Francis Pym as Foreign Secretary and eased Deputy Prime Minister William Whitelaw over to the House of Lords. All told, she made more than 60 changes in her government, including twelve in her 21-member Cabinet. Thatcher assured the wary that the ideological balance had not shifted to the right, but the new government certainly bore her stamp. Pym and Whitelaw, for example, were replaced by Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Geoffrey Howe and his deputy Leon Brittan, both devoted Thatcherites. Nigel Lawson...
...Thatcher's only sour moment came on Wednesday, when the new Parliament elected a Speaker of the House. The Prime Minister had privately made it known she wanted the post to go to Humphrey Atkins, an old friend who had resigned as Deputy Foreign Secretary last year. It was equally clear that she did not favor Deputy Speaker Bernard Weatherill. The M.P.s, incensed that the Prime Minister was meddling in a decision that was theirs alone, chose Weatherill. Thatcher, however, had scant time to mull over the slight: she turned to preparing the Queen's speech, which will...
...Margaret Thatcher did not exist, the British avant-garde might well have invented her. The Conservative landslide that extended her lease on 10 Downing Street has also renewed her reign as the favorite gargoyle of the London theater's left wing. In the suburban pubs and fringe theaters that form London's equivalent of off-Broadway, playwrights have been declaiming for months against Thatcherism and for the nuclear freeze. Two provocative British plays that recently made it to Manhattan, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and Steven Berkoff s Greek, include oblique denunciations of the Tory leader...