UK: Thatcher remains in office, calls for 1992 election

[Coldstream]

Thatcher herself had run out of road by 1990. She’s go down fighting, and it’d be more like 1964 than 1997 but Kinnock would win a majority. I’m actually of the opinion that Blair would have had a better shot in 2010 than Thatcher did in 1992, though he’d also most likely have lost.

It’d be interesting to see what the Sun etc would have done. For all their influence in the early 90s, they weren’t godlike, and they’d be unlikely to wish to squander their influence by backing a doomed Thatcher to the hilt.

Losing in 1992 was probably in Labour’s longterm electoral interests. Had Kinnock won a small majority in 1992 he’d have been hamstrung by a Bennite faction (including Benn himself who wouldn’t have been as crushingly demoralised as he was under Blair). In general the PLP would have skewed a lot more left and soft left after this 1992 election than it did after the 1997 one which would have made running the government with a slim majority much harder. This would probably have seen them go down in 1997 to someone like Portillo on an even more hardline Thatcherite platform.