Margaret Thatcher

"*Power is nothing without authority.*"
—{{{2}}}

**Margaret Hilda, Baroness Thatcher** LG, OM, DStJ, PC, FRS, HonFRSC (née Roberts) is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in Season 4 of The Crown, from 1979 to 1990. She is played by Gillian Anderson. Thatcher was the first female British Prime Minister and its longest-serving; her uncompromising style of leadership earned her the nickname "The Iron Lady".

## Biography

**Margaret Thatcher**, in full **Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven**, née **Margaret Hilda Roberts**, (born October 13, 1925, Grantham, Lincolnshire, England—died April 8, 2013, London), British Conservative Party politician and prime minister (1979–90), Europe's first woman prime minister. The only British prime minister in the 20th century to win three consecutive terms and, at the time of her resignation, Britain's longest continuously serving prime minister since 1827, she accelerated the evolution of the British economy from statism to liberalism and became, by personality as much as achievement, the most renowned British political leader since Winston Churchill. Thatcher first ran for Parliament in 1950 but was unsuccessful, despite increasing the local Conservative vote by 50 percent. In 1959 she entered the House of Commons, winning the “safe” Conservative seat of Finchley in northern London. She rose steadily within the party, serving as a parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance (1961–64), as chief opposition spokesman on education (1969–70), and as secretary of state for education and science (1970–74) in the Conservative government of Edward Heath.

While a member of the Heath cabinet (Thatcher was only the second woman to hold a cabinet portfolio in a Conservative government), she eliminated a program that provided free milk to schoolchildren, provoking a storm of controversy and prompting opponents in the Labour Party to taunt her with cries of “Thatcher the milk snatcher.” She also created more comprehensive schools—introduced by the Labour Party in the 1960s to make rigorous academic education available to working-class children—than any other education minister in history, though they were undermined during her tenure as prime minister. After Heath lost two successive elections in 1974, Thatcher, though low in the party hierarchy, was the only minister prepared to challenge him for the party leadership. With the backing of the Conservative right wing, she was elected leader in February 1975 and thus began a 15-year ascendancy that would change the face of Britain. In 1979 she became Prime Minister after winning the General Election. Thatcher introduced policies to reverse high inflation and unemployment through deregulation and privatization. Her popularity in the first years waned amid recession, but her gamble in the Falklands War in 1982 and the recovering economy boosted her supported, resulting in her winning a landslide re-election in 1983.

She died on April 8, 2013 after suffering a stroke.

## Personality

The daughter of Alfred Roberts, a grocer and local alderman (and later mayor of Grantham), and Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, Thatcher formed an early desire to be a politician. Her intellectual ability led her to the University of Oxford, where she studied chemistry and was immediately active in politics, becoming one of the first woman presidents of the Oxford University Conservative Association. After graduating in 1947 she worked for four years as a research chemist, reading for the bar in her spare time. From 1954 she practiced as a barrister, specializing in tax law. In 1951 she married a wealthy industrialist, Denis Thatcher (b. 1915—d. 2003), who supported her political ambition. The couple had twins, a son and a daughter, in 1953.

## Trivia

* A Soviet journalist dubbed her as "The Iron Lady" due to her association with uncompromising politics and leadership style.
* In real life, she is one of the former Prime Ministers who were cremated (alongside Bonar Law, Stephen Baldwin, Ramsey MacDonald, Neville Chamberlain, Clement Attlee, Edward Heath and her predecessor, James Callaghan).