And, of course, there was Margaret Thatcher's gut hostility to the very notion of consensus - a most unusual phenomenon in British politics. Although I had considerable sympathy with this, since consensus implies a comfortable absence of fundamental challenge and debate, and all too frequently leads to sloppy thinking and false conclusions, my own hope was not only that we should challenge the failed consensus of the post-war past, but that we should establish a new and more productive one. This was not least because I was reluctant to envisage all that we had worked so hard to do being undone. A reforming government understandably wishes its reforms to endure. I do not favour permanent revolution. But there is no doubt that her contempt for consensus was at that time both important and fully justified.

The watershed event of the first Thatcher government was, however, entirely outside the field of economic policy: the recovery of the Falkland Islands from the Argentine junta after the short war of 1982. The decision to undertake this was Margaret Thatcher's greatest gamble, all the more remarkable because she was, at that time, although decisive, notably cautious (her careless phase, which led her into the misbegotten poll tax which more than anything else caused her downfall at the hands of her own party, came much later). Defeat would have been political disaster.

It is, I believe, a myth, albeit widely held, that it was the Falklands victory which won her the 1983 election and a second term. Even before the Falklands war, the polls were indicating a recovery in the government's fortunes, as the doom-laden predictions of the commentariat and most academic economists following the Budget of 1981 were proved to be wholly unfounded, as the economy was clearly recovering (although unemployment was still rising) and as inflation was equally clearly falling. Moreover, the Labour opposition had been gravely weakened by the defection of so many of its ablest people to the new Social Democratic Party in 1981 and was still in a state of civil war.

But although a second Thatcher term would almost certainly have been secured even if the Falklands had never been lost in the first place, the success was what made the 1983 election result a landslide. This was not for the most part because of any jingo factor. It was because it was all of a piece with the Thatcherite approach across the board: the same pushing at the bounds of the politically possible, the same resolution in the face of the most daunting challenges and the same reluctance to compromise with recognised evils. Manifest success in one exceptionally high-profile endeavour created confidence that the same approach would bring success in the much more complex domestic battles in which the government was engaged. Moreover, it at long last exorcised the ghost of Suez, which had remained a potent element, along with recurrent economic crises and the ungovernability worry, in the depressing sense of long-term national decline.