I don't think that's quite fair to the Milk Snatcher.
When she got in in '79 it was after a decade of strikes culminating in 'the winter of discontent'.
Unions were seen to be out of control and the world was in recession partly caused by the OPEC crisis.
However, by the end of her first term she was extremely unpopular due to high unemployment and a seemly uncaring attitude.
The Falkland's crisis definitely saved her in her second GE.
The 3rd GE victory was partly because the public didn't have enough confidence in Neil Kinnock.
He was seen as a bit of a windbag and a perpetual leader of the opposition.
Him falling into the sea during a photo shoot just before the election didn't help with public confidence either.
Thatcher won with a much reduced majority which John Major went on to inherit.[/quote
Conservative live
Lewis Baston: A bolder Callaghan would have won the 1978 election
September 21, 2018 | Lewis Baston | Columnists
Lewis Baston is author of Reggie: The Life of Reginald Maudling and several books about British general elections. He is a consultant on politics, elections and constituencies.
Several years ago, I started one of my earlier history columns for this website by imagining what it was like in 2014 in an alternate universe in which the February 1974 election had taken place three weeks earlier and been won by the Conservatives.
I’m going to adopt a slightly different approach for this essay, for reasons which I’ll come to later, and imagine that a section from a popular history book had floated through from the universe next door…
By the autumn of 1978 the turbulence of the past few years seemed to have come to an end and Jim Callaghan, the Prime Minister, called the widely-expected general election for 5 October, with Labour starting in a narrow lead over the Conservatives.
There were many among his entourage and in Cabinet who thought that it would have been better to postpone the election into 1979 and capitalise on the improving economic outlook, and that the electorate’s verdict in 1970 suggested that voters were cynical about governments that went for an election as soon as there was a gap in the clouds. In his memoirs, Callaghan expressed his regret at being persuaded, against his instincts, to go to the country in October, and his belief that Labour would have won an overall majority in a 1979 election.
…If one is at all interested in thinking about counterfactual history, Callaghan’s decision not to call the election in October 1978 is a moment to conjure with. He gave the decision a lot of thought over the summer and mused publicly if cryptically about whether to do it – ‘there was I, waiting at the church’, as he sang to the TUC Congress in September.