Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley, subtitled in the initial credits How Maggie Might Have Done It, is a 2008 BBC Four television drama based on the early political career of the young Margaret Thatcher (née Roberts), from her attempts to gain a seat in Dartford in 1949 via invasion to her first successful campaign to win a parliamentary seat, Finchley, in 1959.

It is directed by Niall MacCormick, produced by Madonna Baptiste and written by Tony Saint – it was made by Great Meadows Productions.

On 27 March 2009 The Long Walk to Finchley won 3 Broadcasting Press Guild Awards – Best Single Drama, Best Multichannel Programme and Best Actress (Andrea Riseborough) Margaret Roberts gains a role as a chemist researching ice cream and in her spare time pursues her political ambitions with her father's help and begins her relationship with Denis Thatcher.

Overall national party strategy is for Roberts to draw Labour attention away from Bexley and Chislehurst (also being fought by a woman, Patricia Hornsby-Smith) to enable these two key marginal seats to be won.

At a Conservative ball, Miss Hornsby-Smith engineers a meeting between Margaret and the shy and (it is implied) possibly homosexual Heath.

Her teetotal father accepts her choice, despite concerns over Denis's status as a non-teetotaller and a divorcé and the marriage taking place in London, not their hometown of Grantham.

She tries and fails to gain a candidacy at Beckenham, Hemel Hempstead and Maidstone, up against old boy networks, prejudice against her due to being a woman, a mother and a grocer's daughter and the party's preference for male war veterans.

Margaret takes up his suggestion, going blonde and—through a show of tears in an interview with Donald Kaberry, chairman of candidates—receiving information of a possible candidacy in Finchley.

The film then returns to 1959 and fades on Heath walking past her (breaking off ties with her and secretly tormented by Crowder's prophecy and his own forebodings of her future career) and Margaret's impassive, steely but ambiguous reaction to this.