Margaret Thatcher was elected Member of Parliament for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science in his Conservative government. In 1975, Thatcher defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election to become Leader of the Opposition, the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. She became Prime Minister after winning the 1979 general election. Thatcher introduced a series of economic policies intended to reverse high unemployment and Britain's struggles in the wake of the Winter of Discontent and an ongoing recession. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation (particularly
Margaret Thatcher past 70 years. Despite a relatively poor average poll rating as Prime Minister, Thatcher has since ranked highly in retrospective opinion polling and, according to YouGov, she is "see[n] in overall positive terms" by the British public. She was voted the fourth-greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of 139 academics organised by MORI. According to theatre critic Michael Billington, Thatcher left an "emphatic mark" on the arts while Prime Minister. One of the earliest satires of Thatcher as Prime Minister involved satirist John Wells (as writer and performer), actress Janet Brown (voicing Thatcher) and future