Thatcher Triumphant

By James Kelly

Shortly after she became Prime Minister in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was showing a guest around 10 Downing Street. On the way up the main staircase, she pointed out the portraits along the wall of England's Prime Ministers, from William Pitt (1783-1801) to her predecessor, James Callaghan. The visitor remarked that there was no room left for Thatcher's picture. "Don't worry," she said with the trace of a smile, "I'll push all the others down."

She did something even better last week. In the most impressive electoral sweep by any British party since 1945, Thatcher's Conservatives won 397 seats in the new 650-member Parliament, giving the Prime Minister a thumping majority of 144 seats over the combined opposition parties. The Labor Party, by contrast, captured only 209 seats, while the new Social Democratic/Liberal Alliance picked up 23.* Thatcher becomes the first Conservative Prime Minister in this century to be re-elected to a second term, a feat unmatched even by such illustrious entries on the stairway wall as Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan. Beaming down from a balcony at Tory headquarters in London, Husband Denis at her side, Thatcher told her jubilant supporters, "It was a larger victory than I dared hope for."

The election is certain to speed Thatcher's efforts to reshape the political, economic and social fabric of Britain according to her firmly conservative views. Indeed, the votes had barely been counted last week when she announced a shake-up of her Cabinet. Ousted from his post as Foreign Secretary was Francis Pym, who had differed with Thatcher on a number of issues. His replacement is Sir Geoffrey Howe, who as Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer proved himself a trusted instrument of her economic policies. Howe's successor at Treasury is Nigel Lawson, formerly Secretary of Energy and another loyal Thatcherite. Deputy Prime Minister and Home Secretary William Whitelaw, whom Thatcher considered too moderate, has been elevated to the House of Lords. His Home Office job will be filled by Leon Brittan, a fast-rising Thatcher favorite and onetime deputy to Howe at Treasury. Conservative Party Chairman Cecil Parkinson was rewarded for his conduct of the election campaign by being made head of an expanded Department of Trade and Industry.

With Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl recently installed as Chancellor of West Germany and Socialist Prime Minister Francois Mitterrand facing formidable opposition in France, the Tory triumph stirred talk of a rising conservative tide in Western Europe. The election is also heartening for Ronald Reagan, whose resolutely anti-Soviet foreign policy and free-market economic philosophy are shared by Thatcher. As he weighs a second term, Reagan cannot help noting that Thatcher scored points for bringing down inflation but did not seem to lose many for failing to cut the worrisome unemployment rate.

The election was a disaster for Labor, which suffered its most stinging defeat since 1918. Michael Foot, 69, the donnish, white-haired historian and critic who would have become Prime Minister had Labor won, held on to his parliamentary seat at Blaenau Gwent in Wales, but is expected to resign soon as Labor's leader.

Of the 23 seats won by the Alliance, 17 were captured by Liberal candidates and only six by Social Democrats, whose party was formed by disgruntled Laborites in 1981. Two of the S.D.P.'s principal founders, former Education Secretary Shirley Williams, 52, and onetime Transport Secretary William Rodgers, 54, lost their elections. If the Alliance won relatively few seats, however, it did claim 25% of the popular vote and could eventually become a formidable political force. The Alliance nearly outpolled Labor, which had 28% of the vote, while the Tories won 42%.

The disparity between votes polled and seats won, a feature of Britain's single-member-district electoral system, drew immediate cries of protest from Alliance officials. "I feel a sense of outrage," said Liberal Leader David Steel, 45. Complained Shirley Williams: "Under a different system, it would have been a spectacular performance."

In Northern Ireland, which sends 17 representatives to Parliament, the election made history. After years of boycotting British ballots, Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone), the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, picked up a seat. The winner, Gerry Adams, campaigned unashamedly in support of the "armed struggle" against British rule. He ended up polling 16,000 votes in his west Belfast district, 6,000 more than the constituency's highly esteemed Member of Parliament, Gerard Fitt, a Catholic. Adams has no intention of taking his newly won seat at Westminster: his party does not recognize Parliament.

Above all, the election was a resounding personal triumph for Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 57, the grocer's daughter from Grantham, Lincolnshire, whose arrival at 10 Downing Street in 1979 was considered by many in her party to be a fluke. Emerging from far outside the ranks of the Tory Establishment and claiming only four years' experience in a minor Cabinet post (as Education Secretary in the early 1970s), Thatcher was virtually untutored in the art of governing, untested under fire. But in four years' time she earned the nickname "Iron Lady," as a tough, gritty leader who seemed to relish a good scrap. Her personality, in a sense, became government policy. "The resolute approach," Tories labeled it. By the time she called new elections last month, Thatcher dominated the national stage as no other Prime Minister had done since Churchill.

The election could not have offered voters a more dramatic choice. Britain was forced to decide between radical right and zealous left, with only the unproven Alliance trying to hold the center. The Labor Party's campaign manifesto called for pulling Britain out of the European Community, unilaterally banishing nucle ar weapons from British soil, launching a $17 billion job-creation program and nationalizing a clutch of key industries. The Conservative manifesto, on the other hand, pledged to do the opposite on just about every issue. Aside from staying in the European Community and keeping the missiles, the Tories vowed that they would not resort to inflationary spending to stimulate the economy and promised to return already nationalized firms (British Airways, British Telecom, Rolls-Royce) to the private sector. The Prime Minister took special delight in promising to reform the unions, her bitterest enemies and the lifeblood of the Labor Party (they provide 90% of its funds). The middle ground was taken over by the Alliance, which tried to depict the two major parties as too extreme. The Alliance platform, for example, called for keeping the nation's aging Polaris missiles and delaying a decision on deployment of U.S. cruise missiles in Britain as long as there was hope of serious negotiations with the Soviet Union.

Two candidates could hardly be more different in style than Foot and Thatcher. The Labor Party leader looked and acted on the stump like an absent-minded professor: white hair often mussed, head bobbing right and left, tweed suits rumpled. Foot shambled amiably through the crowds, often throwing a comradely arm around a fan or bussing a comely voter.

He displayed an impressive ability to talk for hours without a text, but his train of thought was occasionally derailed. At times he would start a sentence with a shout but end in a mumble. Quoting obscure passages from Jonathan Swift and reminiscing about old political battles, Foot seemed like a ghost from the past, "a kind of walking obituary for the Labor Party," as Guardian Columnist Peter Jenkins put it. In the dwindling days of the campaign, journalists began comparing Foot to another doomed figure, King Lear.

If Foot sometimes seemed like a rambling evangelical, Thatcher appeared to be on an endless emotional high, dynamic, aggressive, thoroughly in command of her facts. Herash-brown hair remained carefully coiffed on all but the windiest of days, and her softly tailored suits and dresses (usually in Tory blue) rarely showed a wrinkle. Always a good speechmaker, she sharpened her delivery during the campaign by using an electronic prompting device, something relatively new to British politics and dubbed the "sincerity box" by the press. Unlike Foot, she rarely campaigned on the streets, but swirled efficiently through high-tech plants, bakeries, farms and wool mills. At each stop, she took an obsessive interest in what was shown her, asking in detail how thermostats were made at a Tarka Controls factory in Inverness, discussing the fine points of beer with workers at Robinson's Unicorn Brewery in Stockport.

Never during the four-week campaign did it appear that the Tories would have a tight race, let alone lose. From the start, the polls showed Labor badly trailing the Conservatives, and as the weeks wore on, the margin grew as high as 21 points. Hobbled by a platform that many voters found impossibly ambitious and disturbingly leftist, Labor conducted a campaign in which almost nothing went right. Foot and Deputy Leader Denis Healey, 65, wrangled publicly over details of the party's controversial disarmament policies. That dispute had barely ended when former Prime Minister Callaghan, 71, revived it by disagreeing with them both. Then while Foot was striving to dispel the notion that he was a tired and ineffective leader, his wife, Feminist Writer Jill Craigie, was quoted as saying that her husband would step down soon after the election to make way for a younger man. Worse yet, the Labor leader did not flatly contradict the report.

Labor switched strategies constantly, from highlighting disarmament to stressing unemployment to attacking Thatcher's bossy style. On the last point, the Prime Minister certainly gave Labor ample ammunition: twice she publicly reprimanded Foreign Secretary Pym, once when he suggested that too large a majority might prove unmanageable for the Tories. "I think I can handle a landslide," she snapped. During her daily press briefings, she often interrupted her ministers to amplify and sometimes contradict their remarks.

But Labor fumbled even the issue of Thatcher's style. In a disastrous miscalculation, Healey blasted her conduct of the Falklands war, characterizing her as a "Prime Minister who glories in slaughter." That intemperate criticism was roundly condemned by politicians and press alike, and even Foot distanced himself from the remarks.

Thatcher campaigned like a politician fighting to save her career, even though victory seemed so certain that London bookmakers stopped taking bets on the outcome five days before the election. Hearing the rumblings of a landslide, the Prime Minister was striving not just I for an improvement on her 34-seat majority in Parliament but for a colossal improvement. Yet not all Tory supporters favored an earth-moving triumph. In an editorial headlined A TORY VICTORY, YES, A LANDSLIDE, NO, the Sunday Times reminded readers that voting for Alliance candidates in marginal districts could keep a Conservative triumph within bounds. Said the paper: "We should not need reminding what absolute power, even if acquired through the ballot box, can do to those who come to possess it." Few voters seemed to listen last week.

How did she do it? In large part, Thatcher owes the size of the verdict to her handling of a colonial conflict on a sprinkle of islands 8,000 miles from home. Only a few months before the Argentines took the Falkland Islands in April of last year, the Prime Minister's approval rating in the polls stood at 25%, the lowest of any British leader since World War II. Once war broke out, her unflinching determination to bring victory back from the South Atlantic stamped Thatcher permanently in the public mind as the bold, decisive leader she had always wanted to be.

The war was only the most vivid showcase for a combativeness Thatcher exhibited, sometimes with mixed results, throughout her first term. "She thrives on confrontation," said a Cabinet colleague. She wrestled with the European Community over British contributions to the B.C. treasury and succeeded in winning sizable rebates. She lambasted the Soviet Union with cold war invective. She coldly withstood the threats of Irish Republican Army hunger strikers, even when ten of them died of starvation in 1981 at Belfast's Maze prison. She pursued an austere, rigidly monetarist economic line, and when members of her Cabinet protested about the pain it was causing many Britons, she forced out a number of these "wets," her term for the irresolute. Says former Labor Prime Minister Sir Harold Wilson, 67, who retired from politics last month after 38 years in Parliament: "Mrs. Thatcher's image is that of the toughest man we've got."

What is especially remarkable about the Thatcher victory is that it took place with Britain suffering its highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression. During four years of Tory rule, joblessness shot up from 5.4% to 13.3%, leaving 3,049,000 Britons out of work. Yet polls showed that voters generally did not blame Thatcher for the loss of their jobs, but accepted her argument that the world recession was chiefly at fault and that she was more likely to put them back to work than Labor was. Indeed, surveys taken shortly before the election indicated that an astonishing one out of three unemployed Britons planned to vote Tory. Many workers greatly appreciated her feat in bringing the inflation rate down from a high of 22% in 1980 to the current 4%. In addition, Britain's generous array of unemployment benefits, which Thatcher has left largely intact, has blunted the anger of many without jobs.

The Prime Minister's success in defusing the unemployment issue is doubly impressive because the economic experiment called Thatcherism is, by her reckoning, only halfway completed. Upon coming to power in 1979, she reduced income taxes (the top rate fell from 83% to 60%), raised the value-added tax (a levy on goods and services) 8% to 15% and sharply cut public spending. Thatcher's top priority was righting inflation. That was a reversal of traditional British postwar economic policy, which held full employment as the primary objective. To curb price rises, she cut public spending at a time when rising , unemployment and the consequent increase in welfare expenditures would normally push it up. The money supply was throttled and interest rates were allowed to soar, forcing up the value of the pound and making British goods harder to sell on world markets. The strategy cooled inflation by cheapening imports and killing off demand generally, although it also threw a record number of British companies into bankruptcy and millions of workers out of jobs. Since June 1979, when the downturn began, industrial production has slumped 11.6% (vs. an average fall of only 4% for other industrial powers). There are some encouraging signs. Bank lending rates are now in the 10% range, down from 17% in 1980, and mortgages have fallen from 15% to a more affordable 10%. Productivity is up, and the rate of wage hikes is down. But none of these signs of improving health are proof that the rebound will persist or that Thatcherism is a success. Although the Prime Minister is convinced that Britain is on the motorway to recovery, many economic experts have doubts. Even official Treasury projections indicate that growth will slow again, un employment will rise and inflation will creep upward over the next twelve to 18 months. Most of the government's economists are bracing for a jump in joblessness to 3.3 million by this fall. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister is unlikely to resort to Keynesian pump priming even if her policies remain slow to work. At one of the most critical times of her first term, when she was being pressed by many in her Cabinet to reflate the economy by some $5 billion, she uttered the now famous words: "The lady is not for turning."

Just as the Prime Minister has changed the course of British economic policy, she has altered the shape of the nation's politics, especially within the Conservative Party. Fading fast is the image of the Tories as the private preserve of landed gentlemen who went to the right schools, believe in moderation, and carry a certain sense of noblesse oblige toward the lower classes. Thatcher has taken the party out of the hands of the gentry and turned it over to people like herself who have worked their way up in the world and who sometimes see a sense of social responsibility as an unaffordable luxury. She has forged an alliance between skilled workers and the middle class; according to polls taken before the election, a majority of both groups planned to vote for her. Only unskilled workers have remained safely in the Labor camp, and theirs is a dwindling breed. Next year, for the first time, blue-collar workers will be outnumbered by white-collar workers in the labor force. Meanwhile, surveys show that voters today are growing less and less likely to vote by class, simply along the lines of bowler hat vs. cloth cap. As if that were not advantage enough for Thatcher, Britain's population is shifting from the big cities that have long been Labor strongholds to the Tory enclaves of suburbia. Parliamentary districts were redrawn for last week's election to reflect that migration, and the Tories clearly gained. "Social changes are taking place which make the Conservatives the party of the future and Labor the party of the past," says Robert Waller, author of The Almanac of British Politics. "Labor has been reduced to the party of the minorities."

Thatcher has broadened the appeal of her party primarily by being herself. True, some of her policies are also good politics: to capitalize on the universal dream of owning one's own home, she gave residents of government-built houses the opportunity to purchase them. About 500,000 have done so. But much of the Thatcher program is rooted in her right-wing instincts. She stirs the hearts Of many with her call for a return to capital punishment and greater powers for the police. Thatcher has become, according to Tory M.P. Julian Critchley, the spokeswoman for a new middle class, "the Rotarians of Grantham who, dissatisfied with much that they see, welcome the Prime Minister's call for radical change."

The transformation within the party extends from the grass-roots level right up to the Cabinet. In Tory parliamentary selection committees, the seats are no longer filled with local grandees but with insurance agents, housewives, teachers, salesmen. These party activists tend to pick candidates from among their own kind. The new Tory politician tends to be a self-made, middle-manager type with more stomach for the rough-and-tumble of pavement politics than his or her predecessors. Thatcher, too, has apparently found the old school ties a bit too binding: her Cabinet no longer contains a Tory blueblood. The last to go was Lord Carrington, who resigned as Foreign Secretary after shouldering the blame for the Falklands takeover.

That preference for the arriviste should not be surprising, for Margaret Thatcher is an exemplar of the new Tory. From her earliest days in Grantham, where she and her family lived above her father's grocery store, she seems to have been infused with a Girl Scout Handbook of virtues. "I'm a born hard worker," she told a reporter. "I watched my mother work like a Trojan in the shop and house." She sometimes repeats one of her grandmother's favorite homilies: "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well."

At 10 Downing Street, where Thatcher once again lives above the shop, the homily is alive and well. After retiring around 1 a.m., she rises in time to catch the 6 a.m. newscast on BBC Radio 4. Often with no more than an apple for breakfast, she enthusiastically bustles about preparing eggs, bacon, toast and marmalade for

Denis. By 8:30, she is downstairs in her office, paging through a report of overnight news prepared by her press secretary, Bernard Ingham. She looks through the Financial Times, but generally only skims the other papers. In fact, Thatcher makes it a rule to skip nasty stories about herself. "You start to see your name and, if you know it's going to be horrid, then stop," she once said. "During the day, you have to take your decisions and concentrate your mind, and you can't if something is really hurtful."

By 9:30, she is often meeting with a small group of Cabinet ministers. On Thursdays at 10:30, there is a full Cabinet session, with Mrs. Thatcher at the center of the boat-shaped table. She hurries the ministers briskly along, rarely allowing any departures from the agenda. When Parliament is in session, she spends the mornings with her staff readying for question time, that twice-weekly exercise in which the Prime Minister fields queries, and often insults, from opposition M.P.s. A cook is brought in on question days to prepare what Thatcher calls "good nursery food" (shepherd's pie, or perhaps a stew), and the staff works until 2:30 p.m., when the Prime Minister leaves for Parliament in her bulletproof black Daimler.

On evenings free of meetings and state occasions, she and Denis often entertain. If after-dinner conversation wades too deeply into politics, Denis is likely to excuse himself to watch television. Even when Thatcher is finished with postprandial conversation, the day is not over: she sifts through the papers in her red leather briefing boxes before turning out the light. Weekends are usually spent at Chequers, the Prime Minister's official country residence in Buckinghamshire. While Denis practices his putting on the lawn, his wife writes letters or reads (her favorite author: John le Carre). But even in the solitude of Chequers, she will often invite Cabinet members or fellow politicians for Sunday lunch.

Tough as she may be with her ministers and fellow M.P.s, Thatcher can display a warm, caring side.

She has a remarkable memory for names of wives and children, and she can be gracious in embarrassing moments. Once, at a dinner at Chequers, a nervous waitress spilled a plate of roast beef and gravy on the Treasury's Sir Geoffrey Howe. Thatcher leaped to the terrified girl's side and comforted her: "There, there, dear. It could happen to anybody."

Thatcher looks, if anything, younger now than when she first won the job. She has grown slimmer (current weight: just under 140 Ibs.), has had her teeth capped and has taken to wearing more stylish clothes. After four trying years, Thatcher's Wedgwood face remains virtually unlined, and her eyes still have their girlish sparkle. "There's no magic formula," Thatcher explains. "The only secret is that I love this job. It suits me and stimulates me. There's never been one moment when I thought, 'Oh, my goodness, I wish I wasn't here.' "

By all signs, Thatcher's second term will be much like the first. "She's shown the color of her money in the first four years," says a senior aide. "She'll follow the same line with even greater vigor." Faced with a divided Labor Party and its disastrous manifesto, the Tories did not feel a need to spell out any new policies in detail. Once again, however, Thatcher will concentrate on what she sees as her main task: transforming the nation's economy and attitude toward work. She is fond of calling for a return to "Victorian values," by which she means the virtues of thrift and self-reliance, hard work and sense of duty. (In an inspired bit of parody, the liberal New Statesman illustrated a special issue on the subject with a photomontage of Thatcher as Queen Victoria.) As Peregrine Worsthorne, associate editor of the conservative Sunday Telegraph, puts it, Thatcher "is as ignorantly contemptuous of the so-called values of the idle rich as of the so-called idle poor."

At the same time, she grandly envisions a computerized, microchipped Britain humming smartly into the future. Says an adviser: "She wants to modernize not just the technology but the attitudes of mtain. She would like to see in the United Kingdom the vigorous spirit she ad mires in the United States, that sense of enterprise and imagination."

Thus Thatcher will press more re forms on the labor unions, including legis lation that would require union leaders to stand for re-election every five years and allow union members to opt out of auto matically paying dues to the Labor Party Declining industries such as steel, coal and shipbuilding will be urged to up productivity and modernize facilities. Besides selling more state-owned companies, she will allow some private utilities to compete with public ones. And in her belief that "property induces responsibility in society," Thatcher plans to permit more tenants to buy their government-built homes. hatcher is likely to devote considerably more time to foreign affairs. Though she spent most of her first term immersed in her country's economic woes, the Falklands war awakened in her a fascination for international relations that has only deepened over the past year. One of her first goals is to improve relations between Britain and the European Community, partly for her country's sake but also as a way to soothe tensions within the Western alliance. As the senior Western European leader and the one with perhaps the best ties to the U.S., Thatcher feels she can be of great help. For example, it was the Prime Minister who suggested at last month's Williamsburg, Va., summit meeting that the leaders of the world's seven key industrial nations en-agreement is reached with the Soviets by the end of the year.

Relations with the U.S. already are excellent, largely because she and President Reagan are cut from the same ideo logical cloth. "She's tough and smart" marvels Secretary of State George Shultz. "She's a great and determined lady who's shown us what leadership is all about " Shultz could not resist adding: "If I were married to her, I'd be sure to have dinner ready when she got home."

Thatcher would like to develop even closer ties to Washington, perhaps setting up regular meetings with Reagan. She will, of course, keep her pledge to improve Britain's nuclear deterrent by buying U.S.-built Trident missiles and accepting the deployment of U.S. cruise missiles at the Greenham Common and Molesworth airbases.

On the issue of the Falklands, Thatcher insists that the sovereignty of the islands is not negotiable and will be defended at any cost. Indeed, one of her public reprimands of Foreign Secretary Pym came when he suggested that if the Argentines were formally to declare an end to hostilities between the two countries, there could be negotiations for resuming diplomatic relations. Foreign Office advisers fear, however, that Thatcher is boxing herself in by refusing to negotiate. Protecting the Falklands now is a garrison of some 4,000 soldiers, two squadrons of jets, a nuclear submarine and half a dozen destroyers and frigates. Estimated cost of that presence this year alone-$672 million, or $373,000 per Falklander A Gallup poll taken last February showed that 65% of the British felt that some sort of negotiations with Argentina should take place. Instead, the Prime Minister is considering promulgating a sort of Thatcher Doctrine. The policy would hold that in British outposts, such as the Falklands and Gibraltar, the views of the inhabitants would remain paramount under all circumstances.

In addition to the men who rose in last week's Cabinet shuffle, Thatcher is likely to continue to rely heavily on Norman Tebbit, the Employment Minister, who has emerged as one of her closest confidants. Tebbit thrust through legislation making secret strike ballots mandatory and regularly delivers stern calls for thrift welfare cuts and hard work. Another Tory to watch is Michael Heseltine, the Defense Secretary, who launched a successful counterattack against the country's growing nuclear disarmament movement. His one possible drawback: he is not a Thatcherite in economics.

Many moderate Tories fear that Thatcher, having won such an impressive mandate, may now discard the caution she often displayed in her first term and let her instincts run their course. As the independent Observer put it:

"With a very big majority, Mrs. Thatcher could get support for the kind of shifts which are close to her private instincts. Changes in penal policy, immigration policy, policy toward the welfare state, as well as the more extreme antiunion plans, are among the sensitive areas where we frankly would fear for the country." Now, with a Cabinet even more attuned to her views than the one she began with four years ago, Thatcher may have lost a helpful restraining arm. As a former Cabinet member put it: "During her first term, she allowed her head to rule her heart in the crunch. Whether in a new Cabinet of her own choosing she will allow her intellect to draw her back from the abyss is the $64 question." Thatcher, predictably, has no doubts. "I am not an extreme person, and I won't be extreme now," she said last week.

"All power is a trust. We have to use our power wisely and well."

Meanwhile, her opponents will be regrouping. It is too early to write an obituary for Labor, but the party's ultimate health depends on the direction it takes in the next few months. If last week's defeat causes defiant Laborites to move farther to the left, the party's fortunes will continue to dwindle. But if Labor steers back to a more moderate course, then at least it stands a chance of reversing the decline.

That struggle is sure to be fierce, for Labor has been drifting ever leftward for at least a decade. When James Callaghan, a moderate, was Prime Minister in the late 1970s, the radicals made no overt move to dominate the party but instead methodically took over its local councils Many of the extremists hew to Leon Trotsky's doctrine of "entrism," moving into established organizations to bring about revolutionary change.

After Callaghan lost to Thatcher in 1979, Foot became a compromise choice as party leader over Centrist Denis Healey, 65. Yet the party wound up more bitterly divided than ever. Jenkins and a score of others from Labor's right wing quit in 1981 to form the S.D.P. Since then

Labor has been torn by disputes over a Marxist group known as the Militant Tendency, which calls for such measures as abolishing the monarchy and nationalizing all major industries, including the banks. The moderates wanted Militant Tendency members ousted from the party, but the far left insisted they remain. Though Foot last year vowed that the radicals would run on a Labor ticket "over my dead body," the group stayed, and the Labor leader ended up campaigning with their candidates. Sir Harold Wilson, voicing the frustration of many of his party colleagues at the rise of the leftist militants, bluntly criticized Foot's accommodating stand. "I would not have anything to do with them," he said flatly. "I would sling them out on their necks."

The party's direction now depends largely on who is picked to succeed Foot. Healey, whom polls show to be Labor's most popular figure, would like to make one last try for the post, but union leaders have judged him too old. Tony Benn, longtime Laborite leftist and prime architect of the party's disastrous manifesto, planned to make a run, but his unexpected loss last week knocked him out of the race. Among the remaining moderates, the leading contenders are Roy Hattersley, Labor's spokesman for domestic affairs, and Peter Shore, shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Hattersley, who helped negotiate Britain's entry into the Common Market, surprised many by not breaking away to join the S.D.P. Nonetheless, he has made it clear he is at odds with Labor's manifesto; for example, he opposes unilateral disarmament and would keep Britain in the Common Market. The lean, eloquent Shore is somewhat idiosyncratic; he wants the country out of the Common Market but strongly supports NATO.

Another key candidate will be Neil Kinnock, whose leftist leanings and easy candor make him just about the only leading Labor figure with support from both wings of the party. As Labor spokesman for education, he opposes private schools and wants universities open to all without competitive exams. Nonetheless, Kinnock may have a tough battle for the top spot: he is already on the hit list of party radicals angered by his vote to expel the Militant Tendency from the party.

Considering Britain's changing demographic patterns, Labor faces an uphill fight to regain preeminence. Even if the party does amend its policies, salvation may lie only in a Thatcher government that turns far rightward or fails to make good its promises for a healthier economy. Labor might also simply crack under the ideological strain, with one faction breaking off and setting up a new party, just as the Social Democrats did. What is certain is that the fratricide that drained Labor of its energy and public support during the past three years is far from over.

As for the Alliance, its leaders insist that despite last week's disappointing harvest of seats, the coalition is here to stay. There is no talk yet about a merger of the S.D.P. and the Liberals, but at some point, if the two groups work together well in Parliament, a marriage might be proposed. Having ended up with such a large chunk of the popular vote but so few seats in Parliament, the Alliance hopes to win support for one of the major planks in its manifesto: proportional representation, an electoral system under which seats are awarded to parties in direct ratio to their popular vote. But since Britain's current system greatly benefits the two established parties, both the Tories and Labor will surely block the S.D.P. proposal.

Polls show that Jenkins lags far behind the Liberal Party's Steel in popularity. Nonetheless, Jenkins is likely to continue as head of the Social Democrats, with the two men taking joint positions on issues in the House of Commons. S.D.P.

Deputy Leader David Owen, a physician by training, who was first elected to Parliament in 1966, campaigned superbly, leading some newspapers to speculate how much better the S.D.P. might have done with him at the top instead of Jenkins. The "other David," as he is commonly called to distinguish him from Steel, would dearly love to be leader and will probably not discourage a movement to displace Jenkins.

Though it took few seats, the Alliance has much to be pleased about. Its leaders won high marks from press and public for conducting a thoughtful, positive campaign, and it showed that 7 million Britons were willing to vote for a partnership that did not exist two years ago. The Alliance may not have broken the mold of British politics, but it has surely left a few cracks. Declares an S.D.P. strategist: "We are not stopping now."

They are hardly alone. "The reason I am in politics," Margaret Thatcher once said, "is because I believe in certain things and try to put them into practice." True enough, but the Prime Minister was re-elected last week not so much because of specific policies as because of her atti tudes. Britons at this point seem to care more about having a strong leader than about exactly where they are led. But that can change. During her second term, the Prime Minister's task will be to prove that her policies are as winning as her style.

Thatcher being Thatcher, she will resolutely do her best to make sure that it is another five, perhaps ten years before her portrait is hung on the stairway at 10 Downing Street. -- By James Kelly.

Reported by Bonnie Angelo, Mary Cronln and Frank Melville/London

*The remaining 21 seats are held by the 17 members from Northern Ireland and by fringe parties from Wales and Scotland.

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo, Mary Cronin, Frank Melville This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.