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As her difficulties mounted, Thatcher budged, but only by moving further to the right. She coolly sacked three of the party grandees in her Cabinet and pushed out the popular Conservative Party chairman, shuffled around six other senior ministers, elevated three loyalists to the Cabinet, then fired four junior ministers. In all, 40 posts were involved in the shakeup. Out went Lord Soames, the leader of the House of Lords, Winston Churchill's son-in-law and a pillar of the Tory establishment, who as the last governor-general of Rhodesia had brought plaudits to the Thatcher government by skillfully guiding the former colony through its elections and emergence as independent Zimbabwe. Thatcher, who felt that Soames had ineptly handled a three-week civil servant strike, replaced him with Baroness Young, a life peeress and a personal friend, who becomes the first woman to hold the job.
Also fired were Sir Ian Gilmour, a haughty and intellectual aristocrat who was Deputy Foreign Secretary, and Education Secretary Mark Carlisle. Both men had expressed doubts about Thatcher's economic policies. Afterward Gilmour confessed that he had written his resignation a month ago in the full expectation that he would be fired. "Every Prime Minister has to reshuffle from time to time," he said in his resignation broadside. "It does no harm to throw the occasional man overboard, but it does not do much good if you are steering full speed ahead for the rocks." Humphrey Atkins, a Thatcher loyalist who has been unable to ease tension in Ulster as Northern Ireland Secretary, was elevated to fill Gilmour's post, while Sir Keith Joseph, the ineffectual Minister of Industry, was moved over to Education.
The most controversial ouster, however, was the firing of Employment Secretary James Prior, the nemesis of the Tory right wing, who had urged Thatcher to ease up on the trade unions. An extremely popular M.P. who acted as a lightning rod for disaffected Tory backbenchers, Prior had even won praise from Labor Party Leader Michael Foot as "a good man fell among monetarists." When Thatcher summoned her ministers to No. 10 Downing Street, she told Prior that he could have the thankless job of Northern Ireland Secretary—or nothing. After some hesitation he accepted the post. The choice of Norman Tebbit, a blunt-spoken former airline pilot and staunch right-winger, as Prior's replacement signaled a toughening government stance toward the unions. Amid speculation that Tebbit would move swiftly, starting with an attack on the closed shop, he insisted he would be rational: "I am a hawk but I'm not a kamikaze."