On 28 November 1990, Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street for the last time, leaving the United Kingdom in a very,very much better state than when she came there, writes Eliot Wilson

I doubt I am alone in remembering the day clearly, though I had only recently turned 13. Margaret Thatcher gave a short and emotional speech outside Number 10 Downing Street, then was driven to Buckingham Palace for an audience with Queen Elizabeth II. She tendered her resignation as Prime Minister, and 15 minutes later, John Major arrived to be appointed her successor.

Thatcher had been Prime Minister for more than 11 years. Asked about the prospect of retirement by the BBC’s John Cole in 1987, she had replied “I hope to go on and on”, and her opponents and some of her colleagues began to fear she meant it. Her supporters will say – with accuracy – that after her election to Parliament for Finchley in 1959 Thatcher never lost an election. So how had it come to this tearful, unwilling departure?

Trouble had been growing in the Conservative Party for at least two years. A new local government finance framework had been introduced in Scotland in 1989 then in England and Wales in 1990 to replace domestic rates. The Community Charge was a fixed amount per taxpayer; it was violently unpopular and seen as unfair, quickly dubbed the “poll tax” after the hated measure which had partly provoked the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

The Prime Minister was increasingly out of step with some senior colleagues, especially on Europe. Ahead of a European Council meeting in June 1989, the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and the foreign secretary,........

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