BY Brendan Simms The United Kingdom has had its share of remarkable twentieth-century prime ministers. David Lloyd George was in many respects the architect of victory over Germany in the First World War. Winston Churchill led the country to victory in the second. Clement Attlee spearheaded the transformation of British society after 1945 with the creation of the welfare state. None of them, however, lent their names to an “ism”; there would have been something almost un-British about it. All that changed in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher.