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Margaret Thatcher and the Joint Intelligence Committee

Soon after taking office a new Prime Minister receives special briefings from the Cabinet Secretary. One is on the ‘letters of last resort’, which give instructions to the commander of the British submarine on patrol with the nuclear deterrent, in the …

Prime Ministers and their Chancellors

The connection between Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer is probably the most important, and potentially the most problematic, of all ministerial relationships. Foreign Secretaries and Home Secretaries can be powerful figures, and yet they rarely have the capacity …

Prime Ministers and Presidents: special relationships

In December 1941, after the Americans had been plunged into the Second World War by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill crossed the Atlantic to confer with Franklin Roosevelt. As a mark of the closeness of the wartime alliance, he was …

Number 10 under Lloyd George 1916-1922

No previous Prime Minister ran 10 Downing Street like David Lloyd George. His predecessors had governed conventionally; he launched a revolution as profound as that under Henry VIII. This was partly because he headed a wartime coalition government, which called for an …

Living above the shop: Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street

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Margaret Thatcher arrives at Number 10 Downing Street in 1979. She is flanked by two policemen and is speaking to a microphone.

Margaret Thatcher moved into Number 10 in June 1979 shortly after winning her first general election. She was not greatly impressed by the untidy flat and dullish official rooms, and when she left Downing Street eleven and a half years later, …