Good-bye - or, au revoir.

MRS. THATCHER'S resignation has been greeted with incomprehension by most people outside Britain, and indeed by much of the British public. Her government, thrice elected by large majorities, had 19 months of its current term to run. Its present majority was threatened neither by a scandal like Watergate, nor by an issue that divided her party as the Irish Question divided the Liberal Party in the nineteenth century. And she remains in glowing health. What did her in?

One can cite a number of her policies that led to dissension within the Tory Party and to electoral unpopularity. The local poll tax is the most obvious. Its major flaw is not that it contains some inequities and anomalies-all forms of taxation known to man are unjust by some measure but that it is new. Voters pay old taxes in sorrow and new ones in anger. The most anti-tax politician in postwar Britain thus became identified with a particularly unpopular tax. She was damaged still more, however, by Britain's high rate of inflation and by the high interest rates imposed to curb it. In a nation of home-owners like the British, who rely on variable-rate mortgages, a rise in interest rates inflicts a deep political wound. The fact that this inflation had been largely caused by her former chancellor of the exchequer's policy of "shadowing the Deutsche Mark"-a policy she had opposed in 1987 and finally brought to a halt in 1988-was glossed over. Perhaps the majority of Tory MPs and economic journalists, who had strongly supported Nigel Lawson at the time, did not like to be reminded of his (and their) mistake. Finally, her opposition to vague visions of rapid European political and monetary integration, though probably popular with most voters, offended a majority of her Cabinet and a passionate minority of Tory MPs who see the European Community as both a new nation and a new career.

None of this would have mattered the traditional two hoots, however, if Mrs. Thatcher had not been lagging in the opinion polls. Forgetful of the years 1981 and 1986, when the prime minister had been at least as unpopular, Tory backbenchers convinced themselves that this time she would be unable to recover in time to win an election due no later than July 1992. Her challenger, Mr. Michael Heseltine, presented himself as a winner. And the damage was done.

Even then Mrs. Thatcher won an absolute majority with 18 to spare in the first round. What finished her off was a complex electoral system which requires more than a majority, and the character of Tory MPs who fully justified the old gibe that "the Tory Party never panics-except in a crisis." Her supporters and Cabinet colleagues quickly convinced themselves, on very little evidence, that she could not win the second round and colluded to persuade her to withdraw and avoid the humiliation of outright defeat. Shattered by the defection of her closest ideological allies, she resigned and allowed her chancellor of the exchequer, John Major, and her foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, to enter the contest.

It was a sad and shabby ending to a great primeministership, but it was redeemed almost instantly by her superb speech on the parliamentary motion of no confidence in her government. This was political theater of the highest order: a prime minister, still undefeated electorally, who had been brought down by a mixture of resentment, cowardice, and palace intrigue, routing the Labor opposition in debate and shaming the fainthearts on her own side by her courage, self-possession, and prowess in argument. She departed the political scene in a great blaze of admiration. He's Making a List Jolly old St. Nicholas,

Lean your ear this way: When you hit the White House roof

With your deer and sleigh, Please stuff Barry's early book

Where the socks are hung, Lest, by Christmas Eve next year,

I become unstrung.

It is not yet time to settle her place in history. But her partnership with Ronald Reagan-together they defeated the last great Soviet offensive to win the cold war-her reduction of overwhelming trade-union power, her transformation of Britain into a modern, competitive enterprise economy, her pioneering of the worldwide drive toward privatization and free markets, even her taming of the Labor Party so that it became an imaginable government--all these give her at least a claim on the title of Britain's greatest peacetime prime minister. Her victory in the Falklands War and her recent dispatch of almost thirty thousand British troops to assist the U.S. in the Gulf remind us that she was no mean war leader as well.

The U.S. will miss Mrs. Thatcher. Her successor, John Major, is a friend of this country; but he, like the two other contenders for 10 Downing Street, lacks her instinctive sympathy for American values and perhaps her willingness to support American leadership on difficult occasions like the Libyan bombing but not, alas, Grenada). If, moreover, the new prime minister's willingness to endorse European integration leads him to go along with the European Community's burgeoning protectionism, we will have acute cause to regret both Mrs. Thatcher's passing and our failure to support her fight within the EC for a looser, free-market Europe while she was still around.

For conservatives, Mrs. Thatcher's resignation is particularly sad. She spoke our language in every sense, pioneered our causes, fought alongside us in cold wars with both the Soviet Union and the Keynesian economic establishment. We will be sorry to see her go. But is she really going.? At 65 years of age, five years younger than Ronald Reagan when he first became President, in good health and blessed with exceptional energy, endowed with experience of government and unrivaled international prestige, Mrs. Thatcher does not seem cut out for a life of spoiling her grandchildren and taking tea at Harrods. We wish her a long life and a short retirement.