Changes

Next to [[Winston Churchill]] many consider Thatcher to be the most important British political leader of the twentieth century.  In a paper done by the University of Leeds Professor Kevin Theakston & Mark Gill, Thatcher ranked in most surveys in the top 5, #4 in the 2004 MORI / University of Leeds rankings.  Roy Jenkins, saying it was too early to be able to rank [[Tony Blair]], the same could almost be said for Thatcher, though he went on to rank hers as ''a 'major premiership' on the grounds of her length of office, 'forthrightness of style', and as the first and (so far) only woman to hold the post''.  Peter Hennenssy, while sceptical about the possibilities of assessing prime ministerial performance, Hennenssy did develop what he called a 'crude taxonomy' of post-1945 prime ministers, which was 'an index of performance' or a 'premiership league'. The 'very top flight' postwar [[World War II]] prime ministers were [[Clement Attlee]] and Thatcher, in his view (Churchill would have been in this category if his two premierships were treated in combination and account taken of his wartime achievements). These were the 'two great "weathermakers" of the postwar years', he judged, setting the political agenda and transforming British politics, though he muddied the waters by implying that Thatcher could be ranked highest as she 'forged her new consensus' while Attlee 'refined his' as 'the beneficiary of a new weather system' created during the second world war. Described as 'below' those top two was the category of 'nation- or system-shifters', prime ministers who were 'remaker[s] of the country in a significant, substantial and almost certainly irreversible fashion'. Heath was in this category because of British entry to Europe and Blair because of his government's because of his government's constitutional reforms. [http://www.leeds.ac.uk/polis/research/pdf/wp19theakston.pdf]

Next to [[Winston Churchill]] many consider Thatcher to be the most important British political leader of the twentieth century.  In a paper done by the University of Leeds Professor Kevin Theakston & Mark Gill, Thatcher ranked in most surveys in the top 5, #4 in the 2004 MORI / University of Leeds rankings.  Roy Jenkins, saying it was too early to be able to rank [[Tony Blair]], the same could almost be said for Thatcher, though he went on to rank hers as ''a 'major premiership' on the grounds of her length of office, 'forthrightness of style', and as the first and (so far) only woman to hold the post''.  Peter Hennenssy, while sceptical about the possibilities of assessing prime ministerial performance, Hennenssy did develop what he called a 'crude taxonomy' of post-1945 prime ministers, which was 'an index of performance' or a 'premiership league'. The 'very top flight' postwar [[World War II]] prime ministers were [[Clement Attlee]] and Thatcher, in his view (Churchill would have been in this category if his two premierships were treated in combination and account taken of his wartime achievements). These were the 'two great "weathermakers" of the postwar years', he judged, setting the political agenda and transforming British politics, though he muddied the waters by implying that Thatcher could be ranked highest as she 'forged her new consensus' while Attlee 'refined his' as 'the beneficiary of a new weather system' created during the second world war. Described as 'below' those top two was the category of 'nation- or system-shifters', prime ministers who were 'remaker[s] of the country in a significant, substantial and almost certainly irreversible fashion'. Heath was in this category because of British entry to Europe and Blair because of his government's because of his government's constitutional reforms. [http://www.leeds.ac.uk/polis/research/pdf/wp19theakston.pdf]