'Ordinary people': The cultural origins of popular Thatcherism in Britain, 1964--1979

The victory of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher in 1979 marked a definitive rightward shift in British politics---a shift which remains salient in British politics of the early 21st century. This study explores the cultural origins of this postwar conservative revival. It asks from where conservative discontent with the state of postwar British society emerged, as well as how this sentiment became strong enough to ignite the Thatcherite revolution.; The study argues that hostility toward the liberalizing trends of the sixties and seventies assumed a powerful and persuasive narrative form that explained recent British history as dominated by an oppressive liberal elite at the expense of an ignored majority of conservative "ordinary people." Numerous groups and individuals distraught over recent social and cultural change appropriated this narrative to express their frustrations and fears. On the one hand, these groups appropriated the narrative in different ways to explain and defend many different conservatisms---conservatisms that traversed the arenas of gender, race, and class in late postwar Britain. At the same, their mutual reinforcement of the same master story gradually intensified the overall cultural resonance and explanatory power of the "ordinary people" narrative.; By the mid-1970s, Margaret Thatcher and the emerging New Right of the Tory Party would absorb the narrative of "ordinary people" as an explanation of its own political raison d'etre, identifying the Labour Party as the dictatorial elite and themselves as the natural representatives of ordinary Britons. In their minds, the Tory Party was no longer the traditional elitist, old boys' club but rather the voice of the average and forgotten.