* 1911 – Feodor Felix Konrad Lynen, German biochemist, Nobel laureate ( d. 1979 )

* 1979 – Sam Atwell, Australian actor

* 1979 – Christine Smith, American model and actress

* 1979 – Lord Frederick Windsor, British financial analyst

* 1907 – Hardie Gramatky, American author and animator ( d. 1979 )

* 1979 – Claire Danes, American actress

* 1979 – Jordan De Jong, American baseball player

* 1979 – Elena Grosheva, Russian gymnast

* 1979 – Mateja Kežman, Serbian footballer

* 1979 – Jennifer Morrison, American actress and model

* 1979 – Paul Nicholls, English actor

* 1979 – Cristian Ranalli, Italian footballer

* 1979 – Gerardo Torrado, Mexican footballer

* 1979 – A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb kills British World War II admiral Louis Mountbatten and three others while they are boating on holiday in Sligo, Republic of Ireland.

* 1886 – Rebecca Clarke, English composer and violist ( d. 1979 )

* 1979 – Giovanni Capitello, American actor and producer

* 1979 – Tian Liang, Chinese diver

* 1979 – Sarah Neufeld, Canadian violinist ( Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre )

* 1979 – Aaron Paul, American actor

* 1979 – Rusty Smith, American speed skater

* 1979 – Francesco Bellotti, Italian cyclist

* 1979 – Megumi Okina, Japanese actress and singer

* 1929 – Abdi İpekçi, Turkish journalist ( d. 1979 )

* 1979 – Michael Kingma, Australian basketball player

* 1979 – Tony Stewart, American football player

When the Labour government fell in 1979, the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher won a victory which served to push the Liberals back into the margins.

After initial Conservative opposition to Keynesian fiscal policy, this settlement was broadly accepted by all parties until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979.

His seven-year marriage to Margaret Hindson ended in 1979.

After winning the United Kingdom general election, 1979, Margaret Thatcher appointed Keith Joseph, the director of the Hayekian Centre for Policy Studies, as her secretary of state for industry in an effort to redirect parliament's economic strategies.

However, the election of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher at the general election in May 1979, at the expense of Labour's James Callaghan, saw substantial trade union reform which saw the level of strikes fall, but also the level of trade union membership fall.

* 1979 – Margaret Thatcher becomes the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

During the 1979 Commonwealth Conference, Fraser, together with his Nigerian counterpart, convinced newly-elected British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to withhold recognition of the internal settlement Zimbabwe Rhodesia government ( Thatcher had earlier promised to recognise it ).

Following Labour's 1979 general election defeat by Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan remained party leader for the next 18 months before he resigned and Foot was elected Labour leader on 4 November 1980, beating Denis Healey in the second round of the leadership election ( the last leadership contest to involve only Labour MPs ).

The late artist Margaret Gardiner spent a large part of her life on Rousay and founded, in 1979 the Pier Art Gallery in Stromness.

File: Margaret Thatcher cropped2. png | The Baroness Thatcher LG OM PC FRSserved 1979 – 1990, born 1925

In the United Kingdom the 1979 elections resulted in the victory of its Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

* The presence and rise of a significant number of women as heads of state and heads of government in a number of countries across the world, many being the first women to hold such positions, such as Soong Ching-ling continuing as the first Chairwoman of the People's Republic of China until 1972, Isabel Martínez de Perón as the first woman President in Argentina in 1974 until being deposed in 1976, Elisabeth Domitien becomes the first woman Prime Minister of Lesotho, Indira Gandhi continuing as Prime Minister of India until 1977, Lidia Gueiler Tejada becoming the interim President of Bolivia beginning from 1979 to 1980, Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo becoming the first woman Prime Minister of Portugal in 1979, and Margaret Thatcher becoming the first woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

* Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party rise to power in the United Kingdom in 1979, initiating a neoliberal economic policy of reducing government spending, weakening the power of trade unions, and promoting economic and trade liberalization.

* Margaret Thatcher who had been the United Kingdom's Prime Minister since 1979 resigned as Prime Minister on 22 November 1990 after being challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by Michael Heseltine because of widespread opposition to the introduction of the controversial Community Charge and the fact that her key allies such as Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe resigned over the deeply sensitive issues of the Maastricht Treaty and Margaret Thatcher's resistance to Britain joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

** Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1979 – 1990

But again the new 1979 government of Margaret Thatcher did not respond.

Though he voted with the Conservatives in a vote of confidence that brought down the Labour government on 28 March, Powell did not welcome the victory of Margaret Thatcher in the May 1979 election.

While on a fund-raising tour of the United States in October 1979 on behalf of the Royal Opera House, Margaret became embroiled in a controversy following the assassination of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma.

When Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, won the 1979 general election defeating the incumbent Labour Party led by James Callaghan, Britain had endured several years of severe inflation, which was rarely below 10 % and by the time of the election in May 1979 stood at 10. 3 %.

In the third ballot on 5 April, Callaghan defeated Foot in a parliamentary vote of 176 to 137, thus becoming Wilson's successor as Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party, and remained prime minister until May 1979, when Labour lost the general election to the Conservatives and Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister.