Masters and Commanders

If Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair were such strong Leaders, then how come much, though not all, of the media and a section of their own MPs were able to get rid of them? If John Major and Gordon Brown were such weak Leaders, then how come the entire media and an admittedly much smaller section of their own MPs were never able to get rid of them?

Labour and the SDP had a higher combined vote than the Conservatives both in 1983 and in 1987. In 1979, an even swing throughout the country would have kept Thatcher out of Downing Street; so much for how ghastly the 1970s were. Yet in 1983, the Conservative Party took fewer actual votes even than that; so much for any Falklands Bounce, both Labour and the Alliance having in any case supported the Falklands War. Blair led his party to fewer votes in 1997 than Major had managed in 1992, and the figure went down on every subsequent occasion. In 2005, Blair beat the only "Opposition" that could still have been capable of losing to him.

By contrast, Major not only won the Conservatives a General Election which everyone except Glenys Kinnock thought that they were going to lose, but he did so with what remains the largest number of votes ever cast for a British political party. The universally predicted Conservative landslide spectacularly failed to materialise in 2010, when Labour under Brown won far more seats than anyone had been permitted to predict. The public that now boos George Osborne and Theresa May now cheers Gordon Brown to the echo.