Premiership of Margaret Thatcher that Thatcher proceed cautiously in working with black communities because she believed they gave cannabis to babies. Premiership of Margaret Thatcher Margaret Thatcher served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1979 to November 1990. She became Prime Minister after serving as Leader of the Conservative Party since 1975. In domestic affairs, Thatcher is best known for her sweeping policies concerning the affairs of the economy, including the privatisation of most nationalised industries. In foreign policy, she fought a war against Argentina and played a key role with President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in ending
Margaret Thatcher "Falklands factor", an economic recovery beginning early in 1982, and a bitterly divided opposition all contributed to Thatcher's second election victory in 1983. Thatcher frequently referred after the war to the "Falklands spirit"; journalists Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins suggested in 1983 that this reflected her preference for the streamlined decision-making of her War Cabinet over the painstaking deal-making of peacetime cabinet government. In September 1982 she visited China to discuss with Deng Xiaoping the sovereignty of Hong Kong after 1997. China was the first communist state Thatcher had visited and she was the first British prime minister to visit