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Her campaign manager Airey Neave deliberately understated her support to MPs, drawing protest votes from members who wanted only to wound Heath. She led Heath 130 to 119 on the first ballot, which forced him out, and then beat William Whitelaw 146 to 79 on the second. This account comes from Moore's authorised biography, written with her papers and cooperation and published after her death by a sympathetic author.
Behind the public image of an unbending conviction politician, the private record shows repeated tactical retreats that bought time to prepare for a decisive fight. In 1981 she backed down from a confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers over pit closures. Her government then built up coal stocks, arranged for power stations to switch fuel, and changed trade union law, so that it could outlast the 1984–85 miners' strike.
Thatcher was ideologically in a minority in her own party, and her first cabinet was dominated by Heath-era moderates, the "wets." She kept them inside while she was weak, used outside bodies such as the Centre for Policy Studies to supply her ideas, and held key economic posts with loyalists. After surviving the 1981 budget, she removed or sidelined the wets in the September 1981 reshuffle and converted a hostile cabinet into a working majority.
Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech on 13 November 1990 attacked her handling of Europe and triggered Michael Heseltine's leadership challenge, amid anger over the poll tax. On the first ballot she won 204 votes to Heseltine's 152 but fell four votes short of the margin needed to win outright. Her cabinet ministers then saw her one by one and told her she would lose a second ballot, and she withdrew on 22 November. The traits that had won her power, isolation from colleagues and refusal to compromise, destroyed the loyalty she needed to survive.