Fate
Then, on 1 November 1990, came the first of a series of events which would spell the end of Margaret Thatcher's years of power. Sir Geoffrey Howe, the deputy prime minister, resigned from the cabinet over its European policy. He then blasted Thatcher, having once been one of her closest allies, for her hostility towards the European Community. On 14 November, former cabinet minister Michael Heseltine challenged Mrs Thatcher's leadership. Thatcher polled higher than him in the leadership challenge, but failed to gain an outright victory in the first round of voting.
On 22 November, Mrs Thatcher announced her resignation of prime minister and Tory leader after more than 11 years, making way for a leader more likely to win the next general election.
Her successor was the chancellor John Major, who was elected on 27 November 1990 and at 47 became the youngest British prime minister of the 20th century.
Read more about this topic: Conservative Government 1987-1990
Famous quotes containing the word fate:
“It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.”
—Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897)
“This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Slowly ... the truth is dawning upon women, and still more slowly upon men, that woman is no stepchild of nature, no Cinderella of fate to be dowered only by fairies and the Prince; but that for her and in her, as truly as for and in man, life has wrought its great experiences, its master attainments, its supreme human revelations of the stuff of which worlds are made.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)