Margaret Thatcher - British History - HISTORY.com Margaret Thatcher A+E Networks Introduction Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), the United Kingdom’s first and thus far only female prime minister, served from 1979 until 1990. During her time in office, she reduced the influence of trade unions, privatized certain industries, scaled back public benefits and changed the terms of political debate, much like her friend and ideological ally, U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Nicknamed the “Iron Lady,” she opposed Soviet communism and fought a war to maintain control of the Falkland Islands. The longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century, Thatcher was eventually pressured into resigning by members of her own Conservative Party Google Margaret Thatcher: The Early Years Margaret Hilda Roberts, later Margaret Thatcher, was born on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, a small town in Lincolnshire, England. Her parents, Alfred and Beatrice, were middle-class shopkeepers and devout Methodists.

Alfred was also a politician, serving as a town council member for 16 years before becoming an alderman in 1943 and mayor of Grantham from 1945 to 1946. Did You Know? In 2007 Margaret Thatcher became the first living ex-prime minister in British history to be honored with a statue in the Houses of Parliament. It stands opposite a statue of Winston Churchill in the lobby of the House of Commons. Thatcher matriculated at Oxford University in 1943, during the height of World War II . While there she studied chemistry and joined the Oxford Union Conservative Association, becoming president of the organization in 1946. After graduation she worked as a research chemist, but her real interest was politics. In 1950 she ran for parliament in the Labour-dominated constituency of Dartford, using the slogan “Vote Right to Keep What’s Left.” She lost that year and again in 1951, but received more votes than previous Conservative Party candidates. Margaret Thatcher Enters Parliament In December 1951 Margaret married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman.

Less than two years later she gave birth to twins, Carol and Mark. Meanwhile, she was studying for the bar exams, which she passed in early 1954. She then spent the next few years practicing law and looking for a winnable constituency. Thatcher ran for parliament once more in 1959—this time in the Conservative-dominated constituency of Finchley—and easily won the seat. The first bill she introduced affirmed the right of the media to cover local government meetings. Speaking about the bill in her maiden speech, she focused not on freedom of the press but instead on the need to limit wasteful government expenditures—a common theme throughout her political career. By 1961 Thatcher had accepted an invitation to become parliamentary undersecretary in the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. She then steadily moved up the ministerial ranks, becoming secretary of state for education and science when the Conservatives retook power in 1970. The following year she was demonized by her Labour Party opponents as “Thatcher the milk snatcher” when she eliminated a free milk program for schoolchildren.

Nonetheless, she was able to keep her job, and in 1975, with the Conservatives back in the opposition, she defeated former Prime Minister Edward Heath to take over leadership of the party. Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister Thatcher was now one of the most powerful women in the world. She rejected the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, who advocated deficit spending during periods of high unemployment, instead preferring the monetarist approach of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. At her first conference speech, she chastised the Labour Party on economic grounds, saying, “A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master—these are the British inheritance.” Soon after, she attacked the Soviet Union as “bent on world dominance.” A Soviet army newspaper responded by calling her “the Iron Lady,” a nickname she immediately embraced. The Conservatives, helped out by a “winter of discontent” in which numerous unions went on strike, won the 1979 election, and Thatcher became prime minister.

During her first term, the government lowered direct taxes while increasing taxes on spending, sold off public housing, put in austerity measures and made other reforms, even as rising inflation and unemployment caused Thatcher’s popularity to temporarily wane. In April 1982 Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a sparsely populated British colony located 300 miles from Argentina and 8,000 miles from the United Kingdom. Thatcher dispatched troops to the area. On May 2, a British submarine controversially sank an Argentine cruiser that was outside of an official exclusion zone, killing over 300 people on board. Later in the month, British troops landed near San Carlos Bay in East Falkland and, despite persistent air attacks, were able to capture the capital of Port Stanley and end the fighting. The war and an improving economy propelled Thatcher to a second term in 1983. This time around, her government took on the trade unions, requiring them to hold a secret ballot before any work stoppage and refusing to make any concessions during a yearlong miners’ strike.

In what became a key part of her legacy, Thatcher also privatized British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, Rolls-Royce and a number of other state-owned companies. On the foreign policy front, Thatcher often found herself allied with U.S. President Ronald Reagan , whom she later described as “the supreme architect of the West’s Cold War victory.” Her relationship with her own continent’s leaders was more complicated, particularly since she believed the Europe Union should be a free-trade area rather than a political endeavor. “That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era,” she wrote in her 2002 book “Statecraft.” In Asia, meanwhile, she negotiated the eventual transfer of Hong Kong to the Chinese. In Africa she had a mixed record, facilitating the end of white minority rule in Zimbabwe but opposing sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Margaret Thatcher’s Fall From Power After Thatcher was elected to a third term in 1987, her government lowered income tax rates to a postwar low. It also pushed through an unpopular “community charge” that was met with street protests and high levels of nonpayment.

On November 14, 1990, former Defense Minister Michael Heseltine challenged her for leadership of the party, partly due to differences of opinion on the European Union. Thatcher won the first ballot but by too small of a margin for outright victory. That night, her cabinet members visited her one by one and urged her to resign. She officially stepped down on November 28 after helping to assure that John Major and not Heseltine would replace her. Thatcher remained in parliament until 1992, at which time she entered the largely ceremonial House of Lords and began to write her memoirs. Though she stopped appearing in public after suffering a series of small strokes in the early 2000s, her influence remained strong. In fact, many of her free market policies have since been adopted, not only by Conservatives, but also by Labour Party leaders like Tony Blair. In 2011, the former prime minister was the subject of an award-winning (and controversial) biographical film, “The Iron Lady,” which depicted her political rise and fall. Margaret Thatcher died on April 8, 2013, at the age of 87.

Tags BBC ON THIS DAY | 4 | 1979: Election victory for Margaret Thatcher 1979: Election victory for Margaret Thatcher The Conservative Party has won the general election making Margaret Thatcher Britain's first ever woman prime minister. Mrs Thatcher arrived at Downing Street to take over from James Callaghan after her party won an overall majority of 43 seats. Where there is discord, may we bring harmony Margaret Thatcher On the steps of Number 10, she quoted from St Francis of Assisi: "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope." The Tories have won 339 seats, Labour 269, the Liberals 11, Ulster parties 12 and Nationalists four. Former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, currently awaiting trial at the Old Bailey for conspiracy and incitement to murder, has lost his North Devon seat in a crushing defeat. Reacting to Mrs Thatcher's victory he said: "I am horrified.

She makes [her predecessor] Ted Heath look like a moderate." During the election campaign, Mrs Thatcher said the Conservatives would cut income tax, reduce public expenditure, make it easier for people to buy their own homes and curb the power of the unions. She will soon announce members of her new cabinet. William Whitelaw is likely to become Home Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe Chancellor and Sir Keith Joseph Secretary of State for Industry. Other prominent politicians rejected by the electorate included: Liberal deputy leader John Pardoe (Cornwall North); Shirley Williams (Hertford and Stevenage), formerly education secretary; shadow Scottish Secretary Sir Teddy Taylor (Glasgow Cathcart) and former arts minister Hugh Jenkins (Putney). Labour can gain some consolation from its success in the local elections, winning several important councils from the Tories, namely Leicester, Coventry, Tameside and Sandwell. Margaret Thatcher's Rise to Power | History Today Margaret Thatcher's Rise to Power Margaret Thatcher Political Robert Pearce considers why Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. She was Britain’s first female Prime Minister and our longest-serving Premier of the twentieth century. In addition, she was a dominant leader.

Rather than conforming to consensus views, she was prepared to say and repeat ‘No’, and very loudly indeed. ‘The lady is not for turning,’ she once famously intoned. So intransigent did she become that cabinet colleagues had to turn on her to secure her removal, in 1990. But how did Margaret Thatcher achieve power in the first place, in 1979? Her predecessor as Prime Minister, James Callaghan, prefaced his memoirs with a quotation from the book of Ecclesiastes: ‘The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong … but time and chance happeneth to them all.’ Yet surely mere circumstance could not have projected the ‘Iron Lady’ into power? Want the full article and website archive access? Already a member? Log in now History of Baroness Margaret Thatcher - GOV.UK GOV.UK Baroness Margaret Thatcher Conservative 1979 to 1990 Born 13 October 1925, Grantham, Lincolnshire Died Conservative Major acts Housing Act 1980: gave security of tenure, and the right to buy homes, to tenants of local authorities and other bodies.

Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the 'Iron Lady', was the first female British Prime Minister and the longest serving PM for over 150 years. Margaret Thatcher’s father, a shopkeeper and Mayor of Grantham, was a major influence in her childhood. She was educated at the local grammar school and studied Chemistry at Oxford University, where she became president of the university Conservative association. Thatcher read for the Bar before being elected as the Conservative MP for Finchley in 1959. She held junior posts before becoming Shadow Spokesperson for Education, and entered the Cabinet as Education Secretary in 1970. In Opposition she stood against Edward Heath for the party leadership in 1975 and won. Her victory was considered a surprise by many. In 1979, the Conservative Party won the General Election and Thatcher became PM, taking over from James Callaghan. Her first 2 years in office were not easy - unemployment was very high, but the economy gradually showed improvement. She brought more of her supporters into the Cabinet, and added to her reputation by leading the country to war against Argentina in the Falkland Islands.

The Conservatives went on to win the 1983 election by an overwhelming majority, helped by a divided opposition. Her government followed a radical programme of privatisation and deregulation, reform of the trade unions, tax cuts and the introduction of market mechanisms into health and education. The aim was to reduce the role of government and increase individual self-reliance. She also became a familiar figure internationally, creating a famous friendship with US President Reagan and gaining the praise of Soviet leader Gorbachev. One great difficulty during her time in office was the issue of Europe. Her long-serving Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in November 1990 in protest at her attitude to Europe. His resignation speech brought about events which were to lead to her exit from 10 Downing Street later that month. Michael Heseltine challenged her for the leadership, and while he failed to win, he gained 152 votes – enough to make it evident that a crucial minority favoured a change. Thatcher was eventually persuaded not to go forward to the second ballot, which was won by her Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major .

She left the House of Commons in 1992, and was appointed a life peerage in the House of Lords in the same year, receiving the title of Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. In 1995 she was appointed as Lady Companion of the Order of the Garter, the highest order of Chivalry in the UK. Her writings include 2 volumes of memoirs: The Downing Street Years and The Path to Power. Thatcher died on 8 April 2013 at The Ritz Hotel in London, after suffering a stroke. She received a ceremonial funeral including full military honours, with a church service at St Paul’s Cathedral. More from the GOV.UK History of Government blog Viewpoints: How did Margaret Thatcher change Britain? - BBC News BBC News Viewpoints: How did Margaret Thatcher change Britain? 10 April 2013 Read more about sharing. Close share panel Margaret Thatcher was prime minister from 1979 to 1990 and is often credited with overseeing a period of great change in Britain: from privatising nationalised industries to allowing council tenants to buy their homes and reining in the power of the unions.

Here some experts and those who were there at the time reflect on the impact she had. The unions: Nicholas Jones, labour relations expert Margaret Thatcher's demolition job on the industrial might of the British trade union movement helped to generate an economic revolution. In the late 1970s, millions of days a year were being lost through strike action but at the end of her premiership stoppages were a fraction of what they had once been. Slowly but surely the unions' strike weapon was emasculated. Strike ballots were required by law; walkouts were no longer possible on a show of hands in a car park; flying pickets and secondary action had been outlawed; and most importantly of all, a union's assets were at risk if there was "unlawful" action, as the NUM president Arthur Scargill discovered to his cost in the 1984-85 pit dispute. Nicholas Jones Nicholas Jones Mr Scargill, like other union leaders of his era, had grown used under the previous Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan to employers giving way.

But Mrs Thatcher, backed by a largely supportive national press, was able to prove that the disputes of the 1980s would be won or lost not just on the picket line but also on the back of public opinion, and much of the media's coverage was turned against the unions. The 1986 Big Bang and the deregulation of financial markets in the City of London only served to underline the demise of the trade unions. The end of nationalisation and the take-up of shares by workers in the newly privatised industries was a stark reminder of the shift that had taken place. Share ownership trebled in the Thatcher decade and so did the growth in home ownership after the sale of council houses. By the late 1980s the all-out strike was history; no union could ask its heavily mortgaged members to contemplate anything more than a one or perhaps two-day strike. Organisationally the killer blow for the unions was the end of the closed shop and withdrawal of "check-off" agreements that required employers to deduct union contributions.

Today union membership is half what it was: in 1979, when Mrs Thatcher became prime minister, the TUC's affiliated membership stood at just over 12 million, the highest it had ever been. Privatisation: Gerry Grimstone, former Treasury civil servant I was in charge of privatisation policy between 1982 and 1986 and oversaw 22 of the big privatisations that took place. It was a really exciting time when we were breaking new ground. We latched on to the programme of popular capitalism and saw there was a close relationship between the sale of council homes, personal equity plans and employee shareholding. Margaret Thatcher had an evangelical zeal to involve ordinary people in ownership and she took no prisoners. Gerry Grimstone Assistant secretary in charge of privatisation in the Treasury, 1982-86, overseeing 22 privatisations Now chairman of Standard Life At the time, I serviced the cabinet committee which was in charge of monitoring the progress of the privatisation programme. We drew monthly progress charts on what each department was doing and she would tear to pieces anyone who was not keeping up.

I remember one Number 10 policy adviser saying to me that she was not so much the captain of the ship but the coachman behind a bunch of unruly horses, and the only way to make them perform was to put nails in the whips. It was a very driven policy. In the civil service, the brightest and the best brains were working on it. There was the old guard resistance at first to the dismantling of big bureaucratic structures. But the younger, more radical officials thought it was a fantastic thing to do. It was amazingly exciting work for people - a strange mixture of social engineering and macro-economic policy - and it was a topic in which Britain led the world. At the beginning, we were doing the easy ones: the companies that would fit more normally into the private sector, like British Airways, British Telecom and Jaguar. It was very hard to argue that those companies should be in the public sector. It is easy to forget what size the public commercial sector was - it was 15% of GDP. Britain was a very, very socialist country.

After she left, you had various people trying to reignite the evangelical zeal, but the privatisations they then had to look at were less straightforward, like the railways, and it's easy, with hindsight, to let some of these taint the privatisations that happened before. The Big Bang: Roy Batchelor, professor of banking and finance Deregulation of the stock market, the so-called Big Bang, had to happen. It was a response to the needs of global business and finance. It did the UK economy a huge service for over 20 years and the benefits have been huge. In the 1980s, luckily we had a government who understood how the financial world was changing and took steps from the outset to make sure that London caught up and, in time, overtook other competitors like New York. Prof Roy Batchelor Cass Business School The Big Bang happened on one day in October 1986 and the result was lots of mergers and hitherto fragmented parts of the City starting to come together - stock brokers, money brokers and banks. It was the start of the creation of financial conglomerates. In purely GDP terms it was hugely beneficial and since then London has never been overtaken as a financial centre.

Global businesses came to London, creating jobs, and the City provided finance to Britain and around the world. The impact on growth and the level of economic activity was a tremendously positive step. London was a leading financial centre and it was a very necessary step to make sure that leadership was sustained. Enormous financial behemoths were created, but I don't think it was understood exactly how to regulate them and that continues to be the challenge. Regulation in the City and the financial markets pre-Big Bang was a gentlemen's club. There was a feeling that everyone knew everyone and self-regulation could work, although disasters did still happen then, but on a smaller scale. After Big Bang, institutions were much larger and more complex financial instruments were created, not because of it but because of the way in which financial products were developing. It is fair to say that regulators did not keep up with this. Generally, regulators have struggled to come up with a system that maintains competitiveness while maintaining sufficient surveillance. Housing: Nick Raynsford, former Labour housing minister The right of council tenants to buy the homes they lived in was emblematic of Thatcher's government, as it encouraged people to operate outside the welfare state.

It was very much public bad/private good, very characteristic of her approach. Nick Raynsford MP for Greenwich and Woolwich. Tony Blair's housing minister, 1999-2001, and then minister for local government and minister for London. In the mid-1980s worked with Labour's deputy leader Roy Hattersley to reshape the party's policy on housing, scrapping its opposition to Margaret Thatcher's flagship right-to-buy policy. Nick Raynsford But it chimed incredibly well with the aspirations of people at the time to be owner-occupiers, which had been growing throughout the 1970s. That is why Labour was right to adopt it as a policy in the mid 1980s, and it remains valid today. It was great for those who benefited from it. The problem was that the Thatcher government did not care about those who lost out as a result of it and did not do enough to replenish the housing stock that had been sold off. This, coupled with a shift in policy towards treating council housing as an emergency option, rather than homes for ordinary working families, meant the housing stock had fallen into a shocking condition by the mid-1990s.

Labour's priority when it came to power in 1997 was to address a £19bn backlog in repairs. The other problem was that the houses in the best condition tended to be the ones that were sold off. There was a serious problem in the late 1990s with abandonment. I had to demolish relatively newly built estates in northern towns because they were standing empty and had fallen into disrepair. Housing was not a priority for Tony Blair, compared to health and education. A lot of social housing was built during the Blair and Brown years, and criticism that more council houses should have been built misses the point. The situation could have been far worse if Conservative peers in the House of Lords had not fiercely resisted Thatcher's plans to extend the right-to-buy to housing association properties in the 1990s. Public services: Stephen Dorrell, former Conservative health secretary She had very clear views about what she wanted to do but she was also a very practical woman. She was a supporter of the NHS and she was also very cautious about it. She was concerned about the political impact of engaging in major changes in the health service.

When she became prime minister, she certainly had policy priorities and on public services she dealt with education policy first because it was her comfort zone. She was a former education secretary. Stephen Dorrell Stephen Dorrell But Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister that did facilitate the fundamental change in the way we think about the NHS and the management of the health service. The 1990 reforms - which gave family doctors the power to take control of their own budgets and to buy care under the GP fundholding scheme - are called the Ken Clarke reforms, but she was absolutely involved - as she was in every area of government. The thing I say about the Andrew Lansley Act [the coalition's recent NHS reforms] is that it is actually based on the same principle of commissioning as the 1990 reforms, and the Thatcher government was the government that first passed this piece of legislation. The acid test of any policy change is whether it is reversed. The policy has not been reversed. It has been pursued by practically every health secretary since 1990, with the exception of Frank Dobson. The Major years certainly served to allow these reforms to bed in.

Margaret Thatcher's governments set off a series of changes that have been followed through by successive administrations and changes that can be traced back to the Thatcher years. In education, Ken Baker introduced grant-maintained schools and city technical colleges - the precursor of academies, introduced by Labour and extended by Michael Gove. Poverty and inequality: Victoria Honeyman, lecturer in British politics Mrs Thatcher was an ideologically driven leader. That's not to say she wasn't pragmatic as well, but for her it was all about the ideology. If you think about what that means, then she was always going to focus on maximising profit and minimising cost. It was inevitable in Britain in the 1980s that maximising profits meant looking towards the emerging markets like banking and financial services, the repercussions of which we can still see today. Dr Victoria Honeyman Leeds University Minimising spending meant reducing the cost of the industries that cost the most money - mining and manufacturing, which were concentrated in the north and in Wales. If you push this ideology to its logical outcome then the north was losing out and the south was gaining.

That's not to say that she deliberately declared war on the north: she was just looking to create a profitable economy and a more powerful country. But the result was the closing of industries in areas that were then not replaced by anything. In former mining towns and villages in Yorkshire, Newcastle, Durham, Wales and Scotland, communities have died. There isn't really any employment. The service industries that grew up since the 1980s have not reached them. You had generation after generation going into work in the old industries, but now you have generation after generation living in poverty. There is no doubt that inequality grew and poverty increased under Thatcher. Her response to that, I guess, would be "it's all about the individual. You have to go out there and make things happen if you want them." That sounds very good on paper, but for some people that simply didn't materialise. New Labour did not abandon the fundamental elements of Thatcherism, particularly economic Thatcherism. They tried to deal with its negative impact in a more socially democratic way, introducing working tax credits and the minimum wage, but the fundamental elements were never abandoned. They tried to mitigate some of the harshness, but it is very difficult to deal with.

Unless you go back to directing industry into certain areas it's very difficult to create employment where the economy has moved out. No ordinary politician | The Economist Margaret Thatcher No ordinary politician Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990, died on April 8th at the age of 87. We assess her legacy to Britain and the world Apr 13th 2013 Tweet SEVERAL prime ministers have occupied 10 Downing Street for as long as, or even longer than, Margaret Thatcher. Some have won as many elections—Tony Blair, for one. But Mrs Thatcher (later Lady Thatcher), Britain’s only woman prime minister, was the first occupant of Number 10 to become an “-ism” in her lifetime. She left behind a brand of politics and a set of convictions which still resonate, from Warsaw to Santiago to Washington. What were those convictions? In Mrs Thatcher’s case, the quickest way to her political make-up was usually through her handbag.

As she prepared to make her first leader’s speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1975, a speechwriter tried to gee her up by quoting Abraham Lincoln: In this section You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. When he had finished, Mrs Thatcher fished into her handbag to extract a piece of ageing newsprint with the same lines on it. “It goes wherever I go,” she told him. And it was a fair summation of her thinking. Mrs Thatcher believed that societies have to encourage and reward the risk-takers, the entrepreneurs, who alone create the wealth without which governments cannot do anything, let alone help the weak. A country can prosper only by encouraging people to save and to spend no more than they earn; profligacy (and, even worse, borrowing) were her road to perdition. The essence of Thatcherism was a strong state and a free economy. For Mrs Thatcher, her system was moral as much as economic. It confronted the “evil” empires of communism and socialism.

Many things caused the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the clarity of Mrs Thatcher’s beliefs was a vital factor. Her beliefs were fine-tuned in the political struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. But in effect they changed little from what she imbibed at her home in Grantham, a provincial town in eastern England, where she was born in 1925. The most important influence in her life was her father, Alfred Roberts, who ran the grocer’s shop above which she was brought up. He was a member of the respectable middle classes, the petite bourgeoisie of Marxist derision. As a town councillor for 25 years, Alderman Roberts, a devout Methodist, preached the values of thrift, self-help and hard work. Young Margaret, ever earnest, was inspired by his example. A clever girl and a hard worker, she took a degree in chemistry at Oxford, where she began to be active in Conservative politics. In order to get on in what was then a rather grand, aristocratic party, she started to distance herself from her humble origins, marrying a successful businessman, Denis Thatcher, who financed her political career.

Training as a lawyer and shopping around for a safe seat, she dressed and spoke as required: as a conventional upper-middle-class woman, with a nice house in the country and the children at posh public schools. She entered Parliament in 1959 for the safe seat of Finchley in north London, and quickly became a junior minister in 1961. Just as she left Grantham well behind, so the new post-war Britain was leaving its old values and politics far behind as well. The country shifted significantly to the left during the second world war, leading to a landslide victory for Clement Attlee’s Labour Party in 1945. Building on the forced collectivism of the war years, the Attlee government embarked on industrial nationalisation and introduced the welfare state. To a generation of politicians scarred by the mass unemployment of the 1930s, full employment became the overriding object of political life. Mrs Thatcher, like almost all ambitious politicians of her age, went along with this. But to keep employment “full”, successive governments, Labour and Conservative, had to intervene ever more minutely in the economy, from setting wages to dictating prices.

In doing so, they crowded out the private enterprise and economic freedoms that Conservatives were supposed to stand for. It was, as Mrs Thatcher’s favourite intellectual guru, Friedrich Hayek, had warned in 1944, “the road to serfdom”. A few intellectuals and politicians, Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph among them, rallied to Hayek’s cause. But they were derided as dangerous mavericks, and Mrs Thatcher, for her part, contented herself with climbing the greasy pole. She was made education secretary in Edward Heath’s government of 1970-74. Heath tried at first to inject a more free-market approach into economic management, but he was forced into a humiliating U-turn as unemployment passed the 1m mark. The government then went on such a huge spending binge to bring unemployment down that by 1975 inflation had reached 25% and people began to hoard food. It was then that Mrs Thatcher became a Thatcherite. She was led there by Joseph, who argued that only a free-market approach would save the country. These policies, extremely daring for 1975, became her agenda for the next 15 years.

Mrs Thatcher, a great patriot, had been hurt and bewildered by Britain’s precipitate decline since 1945. Not only had Britain lost an empire; it was, by the mid-1970s, no longer even the leading European power. Joseph’s critique seemed a way to halt, and even reverse, that decline. What Britain now needed was an urgent return to the values of enterprise and self-help. Thus Mrs Thatcher was reborn as a Grantham housewife. Out went the grating voice, hats and pearls of the aspiring Tory grande dame; in came the softer voice, kitchen photo-opportunities in her apron, and endless homilies about corner-shop values and balancing the books. She read her Hayek (which she was also prone to produce from her handbag), but it was her new populist style that made her a winner. The Lady’s not for turning Mrs Thatcher won the Conservative Party leadership election of 1975, defeating Heath by a fair margin. A woman had never held any of the highest posts in British politics before.

With her twin children, a boy and a girl—even that was done efficiently—her job and her energy, she seemed to be the very “Superwoman” of Shirley Conran’s bestseller of that year. The Russians tried to mock her as “the Iron Lady”. It backfired; she loved it, and used it to her own advantage. But she was also cautious. Well aware that most of her party, let alone the rest of the country, did not support her new policies, she proceeded slowly, appointing her supporters to a few key posts, but otherwise doing little to suggest a radical break with the past. She relied more on the mounting unpopularity of the Labour Party, unable to control the trade unions during the “winter of discontent” of 1978-79, to win the election of 1979. Once in power, however, she revealed her true colours. Government spending was curbed to control the money supply, exchange controls were abolished and the currency was allowed to continue to float (rather than joining the new European Monetary System)—all decisive breaks with post-war orthodoxies. Industrial subsidies were cut, sending many firms to the wall.

Against the background of a world recession, the result was a sharp rise in unemployment. By 1981, when joblessness stood at 2.7m, police were battling Molotov-cocktail-throwing protesters on many city streets in Britain. This was Mrs Thatcher’s low-water mark. She was, for a time, the most unpopular prime minister on record. Most of her colleagues expected her to retreat, but instead she ploughed on. “U-turn if you want to, the Lady’s not for turning,” she had cried the year before. She sacked all those ministers, the “wets”, who wanted to change course, and stocked her cabinet with ideological fellow-travellers. The 1981 budget contained more spending cuts, further depressing demand, in the teeth of the recession; 364 economists condemned her policies in a letter to the Times. This, more than anything, saw the birth of her reputation for ruthless decisiveness. With the economy still at a low ebb, her political fortunes were turned by the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982.

Shocked and angry, Mrs Thatcher launched a task force to re-take the islands, 8,000 miles away in the South Atlantic. Her arguments—that she was going to defend the islanders’ choice to be British, and that she would not “appease” the Argentine dictatorship—resonated strongly with a British public disheartened by years of defeatism and retreat. This, and the haplessness of the Labour Party under Michael Foot, won her a landslide second general-election victory in 1983, which allowed her to press ahead with core structural adjustments to the economy. In 1984 began the great round of privatisations, in which behemoths such as British Telecom, British Gas and British Airways were sold off. Individuals were encouraged to buy shares, thus creating the image, at least, of “popular capitalism”. After vanquishing the enemy in the South Atlantic, she rounded on the “enemy within” at home: in the BBC; the universities; and in local government, much of which she simply abolished. But her first target was organised labour, which had made the country ungovernable—in particular the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), led by Arthur Scargill.

The NUM had cowed Heath’s government with its militant tactics. The inevitable showdown came when the NUM went on strike in 1984-85. Mrs Thatcher outlasted the miners, arguing that it was a battle for the right of management to manage over the arbitary use of union power, and her victory broke the unions for good. From a British perspective, it was the most important thing she ever did. Shoulder to shoulder At the same time, she had not lost her talent for pragmatism. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) brought out the iron in Mrs Thatcher’s soul: she was unmoved by members of the movement starving themselves to death over their demand to be treated as political prisoners, and similarly undaunted when in 1984 the IRA retaliated by blowing up the hotel where the Tory Party was holding its annual conference, almost killing her. Yet in 1985 she put her feelings aside and signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, devolving some power to Northern Ireland and preparing the way for a later peace settlement. That year was perhaps the apotheosis of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership.

The success of her policies at home and abroad made her, together with Ronald Reagan, the most distinctive advocate of a revived capitalism in the world. Under her, the Anglo-American special relationship was an exercise in mutual adoration. She was a staunch cold-war warrior, lauded wherever she went behind the Iron Curtain as a herald of freedom, which she often was. An act of regicide The third term culminated in personal humiliation, though not at the hands of the British electorate. At home Mrs Thatcher set about reforming the welfare state, attempting to introduce competition among health and education “providers” and to hand day-to-day decision-making to schools, hospitals and family doctors (thereby sidelining hated local-government bureaucrats). Abroad she was confronted with the “European problem”—the fact that the European Common Market (which she had embraced) was becoming an ever-closer European Union. Mrs Thatcher’s domestic reforms pitted her against much wilier opponents than Mr Scargill. Middle-class trade unions like the National Union of Teachers and august professional bodies like the British Medical Association argued that Mrs Thatcher was hell-bent on dismantling the welfare state even as real spending on the public sector rose.

Many middle-of-the-road voters were now nervous, as well as rank-and-file Tory MPs. Suddenly “their people” were complaining about “that woman”. And their nervousness was increased by ever-sharper divisions in the party between Europhiles and Eurosceptics, which could no longer be papered over. Adding to all this was Mrs Thatcher’s increasingly imperial style. After her third victory she became inclined to refer to herself as “we” and to ride roughshod over any opposition. She used a clique of fellow-believers to design policy and sidelined backbench MPs. And she habitually asked colleagues whether they were “one of us”. Even the Tory Sunday Telegraph accused her of “bourgeois triumphalism”. In October 1989 Nigel Lawson, her chancellor, resigned, infuriated that she was trying to undermine his policy of shadowing the Deutschmark. She lumbered her party with a “poll tax” which required both dukes and dustmen to pay exactly the same for their local-government services—a tax so unpopular that her Tory successor rescinded it.

She addressed the European question with increasingly high-octane rhetoric, as in Bruges in 1988: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level.” This led to a rapid succession of tactical mistakes that eventually persuaded her own party to sack her, an act of regicide that deeply shocked her and took the party a generation to get over. In November 1990 Geoffrey Howe, the last remaining giant from her 1979 Cabinet, resigned as deputy prime minister over her refusal to agree on a timetable to join a single European currency. As he left, he summed up in the Commons the difficulty of trying to work with her: “It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.” Michael Heseltine, her most charismatic foe from the left of her party, immediately mounted a leadership challenge. Mrs Thatcher won the first ballot, but not easily enough to avoid a second one. Her cabinet ministers eventually persuaded her to take a bullet for the good of the party.

A long shadow Judged from the grand historical perspective, Mrs Thatcher’s biggest legacy was the spread of freedom—with the defeat of totalitarianism in its most vicious form in the Soviet Union, and with the revival of a liberal economic tradition that had gone into retreat after 1945. Her combination of ideological certainty and global prominence ensured that Britain played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union that was disproportionate to its weight in the world. Mrs Thatcher was the first British politician since Winston Churchill to be taken seriously by the leaders of all the big powers. She was a heroine to opposition politicians in eastern Europe. Her willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with “dear Ronnie” to block Soviet expansionism helped to promote new thinking in the Kremlin. But her readiness to work with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, also helped to end the cold war. Mrs Thatcher’s privatisation revolution spread around the world. Other EU countries followed her example, if not her rhetoric: in 1985-2000 European governments sold off some $100 billion-worth of state assets, including national champions such as Lufthansa, Volkswagen and Renault.

The post-communist countries embraced it heartily: by 1996 Russia had privatised some 18,000 industrial enterprises. India part-dismantled the licence Raj, and unleashed a cavalcade of successful companies. Across Latin America governments embraced market liberalisation. Whether they did this well or badly, all of them looked to the British example. At home, her legacy was more complicated. Paradoxes abound. She was a true-blue Tory who marginalised the Tory Party for a generation. The Tories ceased to be a national party, retreating to the south and the suburbs and all but dying off in Scotland, Wales and the northern cities. Tony Blair profited more from the Thatcher revolution than John Major, her successor: with the trade unions emasculated and the left discredited, he was able to remodel his party and sell it triumphantly to Middle England. His huge majority in 1997 ushered in 13 years of New Labour rule. She was also an enemy of big government who presided over a huge expansion of it.

Her dislike of the left-wing councils that dominated many British cities was so great that she did more than any other post-war prime minister to bind local governments into an ever tighter net of restrictions. She had no time for the idea of elected mayors who united real power with real responsibility. Britain became much more like highly centralised France than gloriously decentralised America. Yet her achievements cannot be gainsaid. She reversed what her mentor, Keith Joseph, called “the ratchet effect”, whereby the state was rewarded for its failures with yet more power. With the exception of the emergency measures taken after the financial crisis of 2007-08, there have been no moves to renationalise industries or to resume a policy of picking winners. Thanks to her, the centre of gravity of British politics moved dramatically to the right. The New Labourites of the 1990s concluded that they could rescue the Labour Party from ruin only by adopting the central tenets of Thatcherism. “The presumption should be that economic activity is best left to the private sector,” declared Mr Blair. Neither he nor his successors would dream of reverting to the days of nationalisation and unfettered union power. The Lady still casts a long shadow.

She was a divisive figure, and the issues that she addressed continue to confront and divide. The British state has gone on expanding after a period of continence. Deficits have exploded. The relationship between some companies (this time banks rather than manufacturers) and government has become too close. Margaret Thatcher and the -ism that she coined remain as relevant today as they were in the 1980s. Correction: This article originally stated that Mrs Thatcher allowed the pound to float in 1979. In fact the pound was already floating, but Mrs Thatcher abolished exchange controls and chose to keep the pound out of the European Monetary System. The article was clarified to reflect this on April 12th.

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Question: In what year did Margaret Thatcher become Prime Minister?
Answer: 1979