IT’S 50 YEARS since Margaret Thatcher was elected Tory leader. Ted Heath had lost two elections to Labour in February and October 1974 and was eventually forced to call a leadership election in February 1975. He lost in the first round of voting on February 4 to a right-wing outsider — Thatcher. In the second ballot she got a majority of all Tory MPs over four other middle-aged white men in suits and became Tory leader. Just over four years later in May 1979 she became prime minister.

The 50th anniversary has already been marked by a two-part recreation of an interview Brian Walden did with her in 1989. An opera written by social historian Dominic Sandbrook is due later this year.

Thatcher’s victory was unexpected, not least because she represented a rightward shift in Tory politics — even if anyone active in the early 1970s in the labour movement would have thought Heath with his hard line anti-union stance was quite right-wing enough.