The Thatcherist - The New Yorker The Thatcherist Hendrik Hertzberg CreditIllustration by Tom Bachtell By the dismal end of the nineteen-seventies, a series of oil shocks had sent the economies of most of the world’s developed democracies into a tailspin. Their publics were not pleased. In country after country, voters voted out the ins and voted in the outs. Ideology didn’t seem to matter. In France, Spain, Sweden, and Greece, governing parties of the right and the center right were shown the door. In West Germany (as it still was), the Netherlands, Portugal, and, of course, the United States, it was incumbents of the left and the center left who got the hook. An early beneficiary of this political turbulence was Margaret Thatcher, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, who swept to power in the general election of May 3, 1979, following the so-called Winter of Discontent. Her rise was as improbable as it was inexorable. In a party of reflexive male chauvinists, she was a woman.

In a party traditionally dominated by landed aristocrats, rich industrialists, and upper-class twits of every stripe, she was a product of the striving middle class. Her predecessor as party leader and Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, had been indelibly dubbed “the Grocer” by the satirical magazine Private Eye. Though cruelly aimed at Heath’s status anxieties, the Eye’s gibe was rooted in his stint negotiating food prices in Brussels. Margaret Thatcher, however, was the actual daughter of an actual grocer, and proud of it. Finally, in a party riddled with “wets” who had accommodated themselves to Labour’s postwar welfare state, she was a doctrinaire free-market fundamentalist, a radical believer in the individualism of the successful, a despiser of “society” (“there is no such thing”) and social solidarity—a visionary, even a kind of revolutionary, and in temperament anything but conservative. At her death last week, at the age of eighty-seven, she was the Right Honourable Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, laden with honors. The encomiums poured forth in a torrent.

Some were a little over the top: “the greatest British peacetime Prime Minister” (David Cameron, the Tory who currently holds that office), “this greatest of Britons” (the Daily Telegraph). But no one could doubt that her personal political success was unparalleled in modern times. Cameron credited her with “winning the backing of the British people three times in a row.” Under Mrs. Thatcher, the Conservative Party did indeed win three successive elections, each of which yielded a parliamentary landslide. But she never truly won “the backing of the British people.” Her share of the popular vote—never more than forty-four per cent—was lower than the loser’s tally in five of the last seven American Presidential elections. Yet because the United Kingdom crams three major parties into a system suited for two—“first past the post,” winner-take-all in every constituency—and because two of those three parties were left of center, Mrs. Thatcher’s Tories were able to amass huge parliamentary majorities. And since a British Prime Minister’s power is largely unfettered, she rarely failed to get her uncompromising way even though most of her fellow-citizens were never in sympathy with her policies.

No doubt this was a source of the uniquely venomous quality of the bitterness that she provoked in life and the ugly gloating that, in some quarters, welcomed her death. Buy a cartoon Among the eulogists last week was Elizabeth Colbert Busch, who is running for Congress as a Democrat in the district that includes Charleston, South Carolina. Thatcher, Busch said, was “a tough consensus builder who cared about everybody.” Perhaps this was meant as a bit of gentle satire: Busch is the sister of Stephen Colbert, of “The Colbert Report.” For Thatcher was a breaker of consensus, not a builder of it. And she did not care about everybody. She seemed not to care about the poor and the near-poor, whose misfortunes she tended to regard as failures of character. Tough she was, though. Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), the daily newspaper of the Soviet Army, crossly dubbed her the Iron Lady. She embraced the sobriquet with relish, and Hollywood eventually ratified it. The lady’s will, if not the lady herself, was truly made of iron: strong, unalloyed, purer than steel, but inflexible and, ultimately, brittle.

“Thatcherism”—small government, privatization, meagre public services, regressive taxation, monetarism, hostility to trade unions, indifference to unemployment, austerity as a matter of principle, nationalism, military pride, and Victorian social values, all with a sheen of Murdochian populism—leaves a mixed legacy. The rumpled, cozy Britain of the postwar decades, the Britain of the Ealing comedies, of the Goon Show and Wallace & Gromit, gave way, amid riots and tumult, to a Britain of pitiless dynamism and poisonous inequality. Tony Blair repaired much of the damage that Thatcherism had done to public services, but, partly under her influence, his “New Labour” shed the Party’s pacifism and its last traces of Marxism and embraced her valorization of enterprise. As the current Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said last week, “She moved the center ground of British politics”—moved it to the right. Yet she ended up not only severely weakening the Conservative Party but also moving it to the left.

When the Tories at last returned to power, three years ago, they did so with only 36.1 per cent of the vote and in an unprecedented coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Cameron brought back austerity, with disastrous results so far. But his slogan, “The Big Society,” is one that Thatcher might have taken as a rebuke. And her Victorian censoriousness has been shelved. Where Thatcher forbade local authorities to “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship,” Cameron is on the point of legalizing marriage equality for gays. The Iron Lady had her velvet moments. She told her ideological American cousin Ronald Reagan that Mikhail Gorbachev was for real at a time when many of Reagan’s advisers thought that glasnost and perestroika were Commie tricks to weaken the West’s resolve. But the moral high point of her tenure was a passionate speech on global warming, delivered at the United Nations in 1989. “What we are now doing to the world,” she said, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth.

It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways. . . . The environmental challenge which confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. . . . Those countries who are industrialized must contribute more to help those who are not. She didn’t do much about it, and in retirement she recanted, dismissing climate change as “a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.” Even so: De mortuis nil nisi bonum. ♦ Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics. Margaret Thatcher | Facts Accomplishments Life View articles featuring Margaret Thatcher Margaret Thatcher Summary Margaret Thatcher was Great Britain’s first female prime minister, serving three consecutive terms in office 1979–1990. Her economic and social policies evolved into a political philosophy known as Thatcherism, similar to Reaganomics in the United States, and part of a world-wide neoliberal movement in the 1980s. She was dubbed the Iron Lady by a Soviet newspaper following a speech she gave in 1976—a nickname that she proudly claimed.

Margaret Thatcher’s Early Life Margaret Hilda Roberts was born October 13, 1925, to Alfred and Beatrice Roberts in the market town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, England. Her parents ran a grocery business and lived in an apartment above the shop. They were Methodists who were very involved in the local congregation, raising Margaret and her older sister Muriel in an atmosphere that emphasized self-help, charity, and personal truthfulness. Alfred Roberts was a local councilor in Grantham and a Conservative, and the family would often discuss current political issues. Margaret attended a local state school and won a place at Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied chemistry from 1943 to 1947. She was elected president of the student Conservative Association at Oxford in 1946 and met many prominent politicians. Her final year, she studied x-ray crystallography with Dorothy Hodgkin, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964. After obtaining her degree, Margaret became a research chemist at BX Plastics near Colchester.

She was still highly involved in politics, and in the 1950 and 1951 General Elections she ran as the Conservative candidate for Dartford. Although she lost both times, she received national publicity as the youngest female candidate in the country. She also met her husband, Denis Thatcher, in Dartford. He was a local businessman and oil industry executive. After their marriage, Thatcher was able to resign her position at BX Plastics and become a lawyer specializing in taxation. On August 15, 1953, she gave birth to twins Mark and Carol and six months later passed the bar exam. Thatcher Elected To Parliament In 1959, Thatcher was elected as Member of Parliament for Finchley. By 1961, she was given a junior office in the administration of Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister from January 1957 to October 1963. When the Conservatives were in Opposition from 1964-1970, Thatcher served continuously in various shadow cabinet positions and was appointed Education Secretary when Edward Heath became Prime Minister in 1970.

The Heath government was elected on promises of economic revival that would be spurred by introducing more free market policies and taming the trade unions but became one of the most interventionist governments in British history. Thatcher herself faced a difficult job as Education Secretary at the height of student radicalism, with protesters disrupting her speeches, harsh criticism in the opposition press for not being liberal enough, and criticism from Conservatives for veering too far to the left. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher When the Heath Government lost a second General Election in October 1974, Thatcher decided to run against Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party and won in February 1975, becoming the first woman to lead a Western political party and to be Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. The economic difficulties experienced by the United Kingdom under the Labour government—requiring credit from the International Monetary Fund in 1976 and causing extensive trade union strikes over pay demands in the winter of 1978–1979—swung public opinion back to the favor of the Conservatives. In the General Election of May 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

The Thatcher government had pledged to turn Britain’s economic decline around, mainly by increasing taxes and balancing the budget. By the spring of 1981, recovery had begun, followed by eight years of steady growth. Thatcher demonstrated her confidence, determination, and decisiveness again during the Falklands War—on April 2, 1982, Argentina invaded the British-held Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island. Although she first pursued a diplomatic resolution, a British military task force was on-hand when that effort failed. The Falklands were back under British control in 74 days, with Argentina surrendering on June 14, 1982. The Conservative government was reelected in June 1983 with its Parliamentary majority more than tripled to 144 seats. The government faced as many challenges as it had during its first term. The labor movement resisted the government’s trade union reforms, with the miners’ union going on a violent, year-long strike beginning in 1984. The union was eventually defeated, and the Labour Opposition quietly accepted the success of the trade union legislation, pledging not to reverse key components.

The IRA Bombing In October 1984, the Irish Republican Army bombed the hotel Thatcher and many of her cabinet were staying in during the Conservative Party annual conference. She had refused to meet their political demands, particularly during the 1980-1981 prison hunger strikes. Thatcher was unhurt although several colleagues were among the dead and injured, and she appeared the next morning, defiant and undeterred from continuing with the conference. In 1985, she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement with Irish Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald. The treaty established the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, which gave the Irish government an advisory role in Northern Ireland’s government and confirmed Northern Ireland’s constitutional position. Although the agreement did not immediately end violence in Northern Ireland, it was crucial in the peace process by improving cooperation between the British and Irish governments. Thatcher’s policies continued to help the economy improve. In the mid-1980s, the government began to privatize state assets by offering shares to the public and providing generous terms to small investors. It also encouraged people to buy their own homes, invest in private pensions, and save through the stock market.

Divisions in the Conservative party became more apparent in the mid to late 1980s. The Westland Affair, a 1986 political scandal involving the buyout of financially troubled British helicopter manufacturer Westland, resulted in the resignation of two of Thatcher’s cabinet members. Thatcher was also heavily criticized for allowing US warplanes to fly from British bases to attack targets in Libya. Undaunted by the criticism, Thatcher intimated plans for additional reforms during the Conservative Party’s annual conference in October 1986 and, thanks to her economic policies that resulted in a strong British economy, the Conservative Party prevailed again in the General Election in June 1987. Thatcher’s Third Term Thatcher’s third term in office was marked by reforms to the education system, National Health Service, and the local government tax system or poll tax, as it became known. At the same time, the end of the Cold War revived the project for a single European currency and long-standing divisions in the Conservative Party over this issue gave rise to a challenge to Thatcher’s leadership.

In the ballot that followed, she won but by an insufficient margin and resigned as Prime Minister on November 28, 1990, choosing John Major as her successor. Margaret Thatcher’s Private Life She continued to be an active political figure, setting up the Margaret Thatcher Foundation to continue promoting her ideas, going on lecture tours, writing two memoirs and a book on international politics (Statecraft), and intervening in both domestic and international affairs. On June 30, 1992, she was elevated to the House of Lords to become Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. In March 2002, she retired from public speaking after several small strokes. Just over a year later, in June 2003, her husband of more than 50 years died, a devastating loss. Although she has retired from public speaking, the economic crisis in 2008 revived the debate over Thatcher’s policies from the 1980s and their lasting impact on the British economy.

Articles Featuring Margaret Thatcher From British History Magazine [tabby title=’Featured Margaret Thatcher Article’] Margaret Thatcher: Iron Lady By Siân Ellis A Conservative minister later remarked that she “carried the authority of her office always with her. It was in her handbag….She was asserting it the whole time.” Just as Chamberlain had had his umbrella and Churchill his cigar, “Maggie’s” physical and metaphorical prop was her handbag. It contained crumpled notes full of facts and figures that could floor an interlocutor at 20 paces. “She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag,” another observer wrote. The “handbagger”—prime minister for 11 years, six months and 24 days (1979-90)—turned around the ruinously ailing British economy of the 1970s and shook the nation out of its demoralized slough. She broke the mold—she was the first woman prime minister in Europe and the longest-serving head of government in Britain in the 20th century. She achieved iconic status in the Conservative Party and, as the country’s representative, internationally.

“Thatcherism” became a label not just for her aggressive “conviction” politics but also a byword for the changed spirit of the 1980s. It’s a paradox, then, how much Thatcher was an Establishment outsider. She herself noted, in her autobiography The Path to Power, “I was often portrayed as an outsider who by some odd mixture of circumstances had stepped inside and stayed there for eleven and a half years; in my case the portrayal was not inaccurate.” By virtue of her social and nonconformist religious background she was an outsider in the patrician Conservative Party. By her heretical economic views she was a minority voice. By her individualism in the notoriously clubby world of politics, she generated suspicion. By her behavior in the European arena, she made heads of state bristle. By her very handbag, that symbol of femininity, she stood out from the male crowd of politicians. And by the fact that she wielded it with such masculine force she seemed an aberration of genteel womanhood. What shaped such individualism? Margaret Hilda Roberts was born October 13, 1925.

Her father, Alfred, a self-made man, ran a grocery with his wife, Beatrice, in the provincial Lincolnshire market town of Grantham. They had an elder daughter, Muriel, born in 1921. Home was, Margaret recalled, “practical, serious and intensely religious.” Indeed life revolved around Methodism, with its churchgoing and music. Young Margaret became an accomplished pianist. This childhood living over the shop was “an idyllic blur,” with customers coming and going, Margaret helping to weigh out sugar, tea and coffee. The grocer’s daughter learned the basic tenets of economics, and from her mother she absorbed the efficient, make-good-and-mend housekeeping of the self-respecting middle class, virtues accentuated by World War II privations. Her father was an upstanding figure in the community, a lay preacher, an independent town councilor and later alderman. “Individual responsibility was his watchword and sound finance his passion,” Margaret remembered. From him she claimed her integrity—and a fondness for homespun aphorisms. “Never do things just because other people do them” was a favorite, and it was to stand the Grantham girl in good stead.

The family was “highly political,” and Margaret, aged just 10, could be found folding general election leaflets for a local Conservative candidate. At Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ (grammar) School she was a diligent but not star pupil; blessed with logic and determination, she shone in the debating society. She took elocution lessons—a pre-requisite for getting on in the world. Hers was also a dreamy nature. She loved Rudyard Kipling, the patriotic poet of British Empire, and the exotic worlds beyond Grantham that he portrayed. And when the cinema arrived in town, she was entranced by Hollywood romance, reflecting that maybe it was a “fortunate restraint” that she was not allowed to watch films too often. Margaret won a place to study chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1943. She cut a rather serious, slightly lonely figure: work, religion and, increasingly, politics filled her time rather than socializing. In 1946 she became president of the Oxford University Conservative Association—only the second female to hold the post in its history. Strange, perhaps, that a middle-class grammar school girl should be drawn to an essentially public school-dominated party.

But its dicta, such as self-reliance, appealed to her. When she left Oxford with a second-class chemistry degree, she joined BX Plastics near Colchester to work in research and development. However, she knew her true ambition was to be a member of Parliament. She got her wish, after a struggle, in 1959 when she was elected Conservative MP for Finchley, north London. It had been a busy decade post-Oxford: in 1951 she wed Denis Thatcher, a well-to-do businessman and divorcé 10 years her senior. Early married life was “very heaven,” and in ensuing years in a series of homes in London and Kent she enjoyed interior decorating, gardening and collecting porcelain. Denis’ income meant Margaret no longer needed to earn a living, and she studied law. In 1953 she gave birth to twins, Mark and Carol; by the time they were 6 months old she had passed her bar exams. “While the home must always be the centre of one’s life, it should not be the boundary of one’s ambitions,” she liked to say. Fortunately, the Thatchers could afford a nanny to allow this.

The London Evening News heralded Margaret Thatcher’s entry into Parliament with the headline “Mark’s Mummy is an MP Now.” Women were a rarity at this level of politics—just 25 of 630 MPs—and Thatcher was given various shadow cabinet positions in “women’s” areas such as pensions. In the 1970 Conservative government under Edward Heath, she became secretary of state for education and science (1970-74). Sadly, neither her father nor her mother had lived to see this success. “The fifties marked the start of a major change in the role of women,” Thatcher reflected in her autobiography. In the male preserve of the House of Commons and in the cabinet she felt isolated. Her strident tone, perhaps an overcompensation as she tried to prove herself, further alienated male colleagues. Yet there were plus-points to being different. Blonde, attractive, always immaculately dressed and a zealous worker, she stood out and was for some while a media darling. The tide turned when as education secretary, forced to cut her budget, she stopped the provision of free milk to schoolchildren over the age of 7. Tabloid headlines raged “Mrs.

Thatcher, Milk Snatcher” and asked if she was the most hated woman in Britain. She was deeply upset. The Heath government fell in 1974 amid rising inflation and labor unrest. Keith Joseph, the right-wing intellectual who set up the Centre for Policy Studies to analyze Britain’s economic problems and devise a remedy, appeared set to challenge Heath as Conservative leader. He bungled his chances however, and unexpectedly Thatcher, one of his most ardent supporters, stepped into the breach. On February 11, 1975, she won the contest to head the Conservative Party. Reactions were mixed. None of the party heavyweights had voted for Thatcher, and the victory, “the Peasants’ Revolt,” was thought a brief seizure of power by the lower orders. She was “trade” after all. Others welcomed the rise of a grocer’s daughter, believing it would help redress the Conservatives’ stuffy image. Thatcher continued her lifelong makeover: changing hairstyle, clothes and, through further voice coaching, lowering her voice from its gratingly high pitch to a more commanding contralto.

But the greatest boost to her reputation came following a speech she made in 1976 criticizing the Soviet Union when the Red Army newspaper Jrasbata Zvezda (Red Star) dubbed her “the Iron Lady.” Instantly, an icon was born. She trumpeted the role, later addressing a public meeting, “I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved: the Iron Lady of the Western World!” When Thatcher was elected Britain’s first female prime minister on May 4, 1979, it was against a background of soaring inflation, bitter labor disputes, rising unemployment and declining trade figures—a result of the collectivist and consensus policies that both Labour and Conservative postwar governments had pursued. Influenced by her upbringing and, now, the ideas of Keith Joseph and American economist Milton Friedman, Thatcher was set on what became known as monetarism and, through her implementation, Thatcherism. This economic theory advocated individual enterprise and a reduction in state intervention. State-subsidized industry and jobs instilled no incentive to compete, put too much money into the economy and encouraged inflation.

Thatcherism valued individual responsibility: Taxes and government spending on state-provided welfare should be lower to allow individuals to use their money to support themselves as they choose. The state should be servant, not master. Thatcher ushered in a decade of painful reform, privatization, deregulation and tax cutting. At first inflation and unemployment rocketed, some businesses crumbled. But—“the lady’s not for turning”—the prime minister brazened it out over three historic terms of office, wrenching the economy back off its knees. At least one widely popular measure was the sale of council houses, allowing by 1982 a half-million people to become homeowners (and possibly Tory voters) for the first time. Paradigmatic of Thatcher’s ruthless resolve—and crucial to the success of monetarism—was her defeat of the National Union of Mine Workers, which, in March 1984, called a strike over plans to close unprofitable pits. The threat to the national fuel supply raised the specter of an ungovernable country. The strike lasted a year and saw police and miners in ugly pitched battles.

But Thatcher had stockpiled coal reserves, ready to defend democracy against her bête noire of socialism, the militant trade unions. She won. Whole mining communities suffered badly, yet the greater community of democratic Britain survived. Tougher legislation was later introduced to curb future union power. The general mood of the country, fed up with disruptive strikes, was with Thatcher on the need for change. The prime minister was equally tough in 1984 when an Irish Republican Army bomb meant for her exploded in the Brighton hotel where Tory Party members were staying overnight for their annual conference. Having hardly slept, she appeared on the conference platform the next day, neatly dressed and made up, defiant that democratic business should continue. The image went around the world. If defeating the unions epitomized Thatcher on the domestic front, then victory against Argentina in the Falkland Islands was a key event abroad. Few people had even heard of the tiny British dependency (population 1,800) near Cape Horn, but invasion by Argentina in April 1982 offended every patriotic fiber in Thatcher’s body. Raised on the Churchillian belief that Britain was capable of epic things on the world stage, she sent ships to retake the islands.

By mid-June the war was won—at a cost of 255 British lives. Principle had been upheld; a new sense of national confidence emerged. Thatcher’s flagging popularity ratings also benefited. Less spectacular but truly far-reaching was Thatcher’s role in bringing about the end of the Cold War and contributing to the demise of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. As an individualist and free market advocate, she had an innate and frequently voiced distrust of communism. In Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, however, she found a man she “could do business with,” and she helped to persuade President Ronald Reagan away from “evil Empire” rhetoric to do the same. The chemistry between Reagan and Thatcher made their alliance a high point of the special relationship between Britain and the United States in the 20th century. “She was warm, feminine, gracious and intelligent and it was evident from our first words that we were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding economic freedom,” Reagan remarked. Instinctively an Atlanticist, Thatcher was less easy about European union. She demanded—and got—a refund on Britain’s excessive contributions to the European Economic Community with a belligerence that set the tone for future negotiations.

While in favor of a common market, she resisted measures that could inch member countries toward a federalist super state and erode British sovereignty. Britain would stand aside from mainstream integration. Behind the scenes, Thatcher had an awesome work ethic. She slept only four hours a night and “living over the shop” at 10 Downing St. suited her (there’s a delicious irony in a grocer’s daughter running a “nation of shopkeepers”). She quickly mastered briefs in minute detail and was intolerant of “woolly” thinking. Yet, despite popular opinion to the contrary, she could be persuaded by others’ views—if well argued. Behind the hectoring caricatures—Attila the Hen, TBW (That Bloody Woman)—a far more charming, feminine side existed and was employed to get her own way. “Perhaps we were a little bit in love with her,” one young man who worked for her recalled. She enjoyed male company, female less so (the Queen was said to dislike their weekly meetings). Staff at No. 10 adored her for the thousand small kindnesses she showed, such as asking after the health of an ailing family member. This was not the uncaring tyrant of cartoonists.

On occasion she appeared blissfully unstreetwise, most famously when she declared in admiration of her faithful deputy, Willie Whitelaw, “Every prime minister needs a Willie.” Thatcher’s home life, indeed her career, had the firm anchor of her husband Denis. The media affectionately portrayed him as a gin-swilling, golf-playing buffoon, but he fulfilled his role of consort to perfection, content to support, a silent smile on his face. He had helped give the Grantham girl social confidence, and his money had allowed her to chase her ambition; his own success meant he felt unthreatened by her achievement. He encouraged, advised, gave the arm that consoled, and he alone could call late-night meetings to a close, tapping his watch and reminding, “Margaret, time for Bedfordshire.” In the morning, Margaret would cook his breakfast. She also doted on her son, Mark; relations with Carol seemed a little less close. The public rarely glimpsed any chinks in the Iron Lady’s armor, and in the end she stayed too long in power. She was perceived to be arrogant, dictatorial, contemptuously handbagging her cabinet colleagues.

She badly misjudged when she introduced the notorious poll tax despite advice against it; she openly clashed with her chancellor over monetary policy and with her foreign secretary on European policy. Both resigned, precipitating a party leadership battle, which concluded in Thatcher’s resignation on November 28, 1990. She was cast back outside. For once the tears were public as she left 10 Downing St. Elevated to the House of Lords, she styled herself Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in honor of her roots. She set up the Margaret Thatcher Foundation to continue to promote her ideas and undertook lecture tours; she was particularly gratified by her welcome in the United States, “the seat of radical modern conservative thinking and almost my second home.” After a series of small strokes, doctors advised her in 2002 against public speaking. In 2003 Denis, her constant companion, died; they had been married 52 years. More than any political knocks, it was a devastating loss. Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism often evoke visceral love or hate.

She was a role model for individualism and the success of the individual who worked hard—not always an easy trajectory in a nation of team players where traditionally it’s the playing, not the winning, that counts. Some said her policies legitimized selfishness. Feminists murmured that she failed to help other women break into public life—women were notably absent from high office in her governments. But that missed the point of her individualism, and she led by example. Her legacy, like her life, is one of paradox. A force for change, she saved her country from the economic mire and made it governable again, but threw the Conservative Party into turmoil. She altered national attitudes: After monetarism there has been no return to Keynesian economics, and Britain is no longer the sick country of Europe. She consolidated the Atlantic Alliance and helped create the dynamics of the post–Cold War world, but left the Tory Party—and the country—deeply divided on Europe and integration into its union. However these legacies play out, Margaret Thatcher will be seen as an icon of the 20th century and one of Britain’s outstanding peacetime prime ministers.

[tabby title=’More Margaret Thatcher Articles’][srp widget_title=”” widget_css_id=”testing-grid” post_type=”post” post_content_type=”content” post_content_length=”50″ post_content_length_mode=”words” post_title_length=”12″ post_title_length_mode=”words” post_date=”no” post_offset=”1″ category_include=”199″ string_break=” More…” layout_mode=”multi_column” srp post_limit=”200″ display_thumbnail=”no” vf_everything=”no”][tabbyending] Copyright 2014 British Heritage. Ted Heath: still a surly man of mystery Books Ted Heath: still a surly man of mystery Vain, rude, penny-pinching — and apparently not even musical — the ‘Grocer’ was more peculiar than most, says Richard Ingrams Edward Heath: A Singular Life Michael McManus Elliott & Thompson, pp.432, £25 Ted ‘Grocer’ Heath, as he will always be for me, was chosen by his fellow MPs to be their leader in 1965 as the Tory answer to Harold Wilson.

After two Old Etonian patricians, Macmillan and Douglas-Home, the Grocer was a grammar-school boy, a meritocrat who would spearhead a new-look, classless Conservative party. He was a clever, hard-working man, totally devoted to his political career. Unfortunately, with his wooden stance and curious ‘neow-neow’ voice, he lacked charisma, a failing he would never have admitted, as Michael Gove did recently. I remember Heath presenting the awards at the annual What the Papers Say lunch in 1968 and you could see journalists furtively looking at their watches after only a few minutes of his speech. This man will never be prime minister was my firm conviction. Yet two years later, proving once again that you cannot predict political outcomes, Heath won the general election to the surprise of everyone apart from himself. And almost immediately, as the many witnesses contributing to this interesting new book attest, things started to go wrong. ‘Something happened to Ted Heath once he became Prime Minister,’ David Howell recalls: ‘The old sparkle vanished.’ Ian Macleod, the star member of his team, died suddenly.

Unemployment and prices rose, the trade unions grew increasingly militant and before long we had the three-day week and an ill-timed election which Heath lost. It came as something of a shock when he then lost a leadership contest to Margaret Thatcher the following year. ‘Reserved’, ‘buttoned-up’ and similar expressions recur in the reminiscences of Heath’s circle which Michael McManus has assembled. ‘Rude’ is another word which crops up regularly, though usually introduced with a note of regret and the urge to absolve Heath of being deliberately insulting. Yet there are too many stories of his bad manners, particularly towards women, many of whom had the misfortune to sit next to him at a dinner party only to be ignored throughout the meal. Appropriately it was a woman in the shape of Margaret Thatcher who put paid to his career and then made things worse by pursuing, successfully, the radical policies which he had attempted but later abandoned.

Poor Grocer was to spend the rest of his days nursing a grievance and thereby confirming what Anthony Trollope once wrote: There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance, a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour allowing him to plead his own case in his own court, within his own heart and always to plead it successfully. Speculation continues to this day about Heath’s sexuality with no firm evidence being produced, least of all to back up the latest far-fetched allegations, trumpeted by the Wiltshire police, of the abuse of young boys. What is certain is that Heath’s failures, most notably his long sulk, stemmed from his lack of a wife. ‘Behind every successful man,’ said Maryon Pearson, wife of Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson, ‘stands a surprised woman,’ and her necessary role is to quash any tendency on the part of her mate to think too highly of himself and to put a stop to his more pointless projects and feuds. A Mrs (or Lady) Heath would very soon have told the Grocer to snap out of it.

As it was, left to his own devices he could sit for years in his grand house in the close of Salisbury Cathedral feeling sorry for himself. I visited him there once, sent to do an interview by the Evening Standard, but it was a difficult task getting anything out of him. I remember the grand piano, its shiny surface covered with silver-framed photographs of the Grocer with Mao Zedong and other more successful contemporaries. I remember too the armed policeman in a sentry box in front of the house, though a would-be assassin could easily have taken a pot shot at him from the river bank at the rear where he would have been a sitting duck. Increasingly vain and self-important, he commissioned John Piper to paint two pictures of his house and, thinking that he was doing the artist a great favour, didn’t pay him a penny. When he toured the country signing his coffee-table books — Music, Sailing, etc — a security man would go ahead advising booksellers that Mr Heath liked to be presented with a book from the stock, his preference being for expensive art books. He convinced himself that he was a great conductor, though professional musicians giggled about him behind his back.

Once the string players of an orchestra all tuned their instruments up a semitone to see if he would notice, which he didn’t. To his dying day he remained resolutely buttoned-up. Yet I always felt that beneath the buttons there was an unbuttoned-up man trying vainly to get out. Flashes of humour, of great warmth and kindness would emerge from time to time before the buttons were fastened once again. What caused him to be like that remains a mystery; and the only lesson to be learned from this revealing book is that politicians are peculiar people and that the Grocer was more peculiar than most. Richard Ingrams edited Private Eye from 1963 to 1986 and the Oldie from 1992 until 2014. Subscribe to The Spectator today for a quality of argument not found in any other publication. Get more Spectator for less – just £12 for 12 issues .

Ted Heath's gay friend claims the ex-MP hid his true sexuality his entire life | Daily Mail Online Ted Heath's young oriental companion, and the gay friend who claims the ex-PM hid his true sexuality his entire life Jeremy Norman, Mr Heath's friend, believes he was a closet homosexual Met a man he believed to be his secret lover at a dinner party in 2004 Sir Edward was an MP for 51 years, and Prime Minister between 1970-74 He was never known to have had any sexual relationships at all Always kept very quiet about his personal affairs during interviews Was always speculation about whether or not he was gay Mr Norman says that his friend may have chosen career over love life Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dies after suffering stroke | Fox News Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dies after suffering stroke Published April 08, 2013 Facebook 0 Twitter 0 livefyre Email Print Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, an outspoken woman known to many as "The Iron Lady," has died at 87 after suffering a stroke.

"It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning,” Thatcher spokesperson Lord Bell said in a statement. Thatcher led Britain's Conservatives to three election victories from 1979 to 1990, the longest continuous period in office by a British prime minister since the early 19th century. Alongside former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Thatcher battled against communism and saw the Berlin Wall get torn down in 1989. On Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his trip to several European countries after the announcement of Thatcher's death. "We have lost a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton,'' Cameron said in a statement. More On This... Meryl Streep reacts to Margaret Thatcher's death: I 'was honored' to play her Tony Blair, a former British prime minister, said Thatcher had a vast impact on the world. "Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world," he said. "Margaret was such a leader." President Barack Obama said with Thatcher's death, America has lost a "true friend," while former President George W.

Bush echoed Blair's sentiment, calling Thatcher an "inspirational leader." "Prime Minister Thatcher is a great example of strength and character, and a great ally who strengthened the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States," Bush said in a statement. Buckingham Palace said Queen Elizabeth II was sad to hear the news of Thatcher's passing, adding that she would be sending a private message of sympathy to the family today. Downing Street said the Queen has authorized a ceremonial funeral — a step short of a state funeral — to be held at St. Paul's Cathedral. It said the funeral will be attended by a "wide and diverse range of people," and the service will be followed by a private cremation. But it did not provide further details on the timing of the service, saying only that the arrangement are "in line with the wishes" of Thatcher's family. During 11 bruising years as prime minister, Thatcher transformed her country by a ruthless dedication to free markets and infuriated European allies. She transferred large chunks of the economy from the state hands to private ownership. "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money," she once said, according to Reuters.

Thatcher retired from public engagements in 2002 following a series of small strokes, and was only occasionally seen in public since then. To her fervent admirers, battling Maggie was an icon, a national savior who ended Britain's post-World War II cycle of confrontation and decline -- eclipsed as a 20th-century British leader only by Winston Churchill. Her vehement critics, however, saw her as a bellicose figure at home and abroad, a destroyer of industries and, with it, a way of life. She was a sharply divisive figure even within her Conservative Party, especially on the issue of European integration; the party declined into a bickering shambles after she fell from power. Between 1979 and 1990, her governments crushed the once-mighty labor unions, defeated Argentina in the Falkland Islands war and preached military readiness to the Western alliance. "We have raised Britain in the respect of the world from what it was -- broke, bankrupt, unwilling to defend itself properly," Thatcher declared in 1987.

"We have, I think, transformed Britain." Thatcher's years in power overlapped Reagan's two terms as president, and her support for the American leader and her agreement with his world view never wavered. It was a political union of opposites: Thatcher had none of Reagan's disarming charm, and he lacked her appetite for hard work and devotion to detail. The grocer's daughter became Europe's first female prime minister in 1979, four years after the Conservative Party surprised itself by making her its leader. Typically, she jumped into the leadership race while more prominent male colleagues dithered, and then proved unstoppable. Thatcher led the Tories to a landslide victory in 1979, followed by easy wins in 1983 and 1987. She loved the jokes claiming she beat her all-male Cabinet ministers with her handbag, and reveled in being the "Iron Lady," a nickname coined by the Soviet press. At home, she sold huge, loss-making state-owned companies, from Jaguar to national utilities to British Airways. Many became profitable. For the employed majority of Britons, living standards rose dramatically, but the gap widened between the well-off and the poor.

The late Peter Jenkins, a leading liberal political commentator throughout the Thatcher years, once wrote that she had "changed the political map and put her country on its feet again." "She did all this with ruthlessness and much injustice and at a high cost in human misery, but she did it," he said. Margaret Hilda Roberts was born Oct. 13, 1925, in the central England town of Grantham, the younger daughter of Beatrice and Alfred Roberts, a strict Methodist and pillar of the local community. Throughout her life, she espoused his values of hard work and thrift. She earned a science degree at Oxford University, working for a time as a research chemist before switching to law and becoming a barrister -- a lawyer who argues cases in court. In 1951, she married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman 11 years her senior. Their children, twins Mark and Carol, were born in 1953. She called Denis, who died June 26, 2003, her rock and her great support. He paid for the nannies and private boarding schools which gave her the freedom to make a political career.

Thatcher was elected to Parliament in 1959, the youngest of 25 women in the House of Commons, representing Finchley in north London. As education secretary in the 1970-74 government of Prime Minister Edward Heath, newspapers dubbed her "Thatcher Milk Snatcher" when she ended free milk for schoolchildren. Her big chance came in 1975 when the Tories dumped Heath. Thus began what a biographer, the late Hugo Young, called "an era in which an ordinary politician, laboring under many disadvantages, grew into an international figure who did some extraordinary things to her country." She marked her course clearly. "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, they are the essence of a free economy, and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend," she said in a speech in 1975. Her ascension to prime minister came in May 1979 on a wave of popular disgust at high inflation, garbage-strewn streets and a series of public sector strikes under the Labour Party government of James Callaghan.

When her popularity was at a low ebb in 1982, Argentina invaded the Falklands Islands. Spurning negotiation, she dispatched warships to the remote south Atlantic archipelago. "Rejoice! Rejoice!" she exclaimed after British Marines retook South Georgia island. The surge of national pride that followed Britain's victory carried her triumphantly through the 1983 national elections, a victory aided by a Labour Party torn apart by years of infighting. Even detractors admired her courage. After surviving an Irish Republican Army bomb that killed five people at the Conservatives' 1984 convention, Thatcher brushed off the dust of her shattered Brighton hotel suite and, hours later, made her keynote speech on cue. She never faltered, in word or deed, in her support of the United States. In 1986, she allowed U.S. warplanes to fly from British bases to bomb Libya. She sent ships, tanks and troops to fight against Iraq in the first Gulf War, but had resigned before the battle was joined in 1991. Thatcher was one of the first to spot Mikhail Gorbachev as a promising leader of the Soviet Union. "I like Mr.

Gorbachev, we can do business together," she said after their first meeting in Britain in 1984. Three months later, Gorbachev became the Soviet leader. In her memoirs, Thatcher said of Gorbachev: "I spotted him because I was searching for someone like him. And I was confident that such a person could exist, even within that totalitarian structure, because I believed that the spirit of the individual could never ultimately be crushed in the Kremlin any more than in the Gulag." Thatcher sat next to Gorbachev at Reagan's funeral, and in a taped eulogy spoke of the personal dynamics of the era of "perestroika." "I cannot imagine how any diplomat, or any dramatist, could improve on (Reagan's) words to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva summit: `Let me tell you why it is we distrust you.' Those words are candid and tough and they cannot have been easy to hear. But they are also a clear invitation to a new beginning and a new relationship that would be rooted in trust," she said.

Though Thatcher's Conservatives won re-election in 1987, the fall of the Iron Curtain deprived her of a key role as the scourge of communism, and she could appear out of touch with the times. She opposed the unification of Germany in tones that suggested the Nazi era was not forgiven, and her opposition to the growing influence of the European Union became more strident and nationalistic. Thatcher had often seemed at odds with her own government's policy of developing European integration, and the issue became her downfall in 1990 when Conservative legislators were feeling a panic over the government's low opinion poll ratings. In November of that year, she fell short of winning re-election as Tory leader on the first ballot of Conservative legislators. "I fight on. I fight to win," she said. But, persuaded that the party had abandoned her, she resigned. "The people who brought about that incident are responsible for the biggest defeat the Conservative Party has ever had," she said after Tony Blair's Labour Party ended 18 years of Tory rule in 1997. "It was catastrophic for me because I got things right." Blair's "New Labour" government, ironically, became part of her formidable legacy.

The once-socialist Labourites moved to the center with echoes of Thatcherism -- from preserving Britain's nuclear deterrent to telling single mothers on welfare to find work. Out of power, Lady Thatcher, named a baroness in 1992, made regular and lucrative U.S. lecture tours, and founded the Thatcher Foundation to spread her free-market philosophy. Europe remained an obsession. In her book, "Statecraft," published in 2002, she described the European Union as "perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era" and wrote that most of the 20th century's greatest problems -- including Nazism and Marxism -- originated on the continent. Thatcher hardly ever admitted any regrets, but in a 1998 interview with the British magazine Saga she said she rarely saw her children or grandchildren. "It's very sad," she said. "It's something that I thought would never happen." Was it the price of power? Margaret Thatcher, U.K.

‘Iron Lady’ Prime Minister, Dies - Bloomberg Bloomberg the Company & Its Products Bloomberg Anywhere Remote LoginBloomberg Anywhere Login Bloomberg Terminal Demo Request Bloomberg Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world. Customer Support Advertising Bloomberg Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world. Customer Support Margaret Thatcher, U.K. ‘Iron Lady’ Prime Minister, Dies Robert Hutton Margaret Thatcher, the former U.K. prime minister who helped end the Cold War and was known as the “Iron Lady” for her uncompromising style, died yesterday. She was 87. Thatcher suffered a stroke on the morning of April 8 and died peacefully, according to her spokesman, Tim Bell. Thatcher was defined by the battles she won: she waged war against Argentina over the Falkland Islands, clashed with striking miners and forced fellow leaders to cut Britain’s financial contributions to the forerunner of the European Union.

She survived an assassination attempt in 1984 when the Irish Republican Army bombed her hotel in Brighton during the Conservatives’ annual conference, killing five people. She stuck to her schedule and addressed party members the next day. “We can’t deny that Lady Thatcher divided opinion,” Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said outside his No. 10 Downing Street residence, where flags flew at half staff. “For many of us, she was and is an inspiration. For others she was a force to be defined against. But if there is one thing that cuts through all of this --- one thing that runs through everything she did --- it was her lion-hearted love for this country.” When Thatcher’s Conservative Party took office in 1979, Britain’s trade unions were strong enough to knock out party leaders, and key industries were state-owned. By the time she stepped down 11 years later, her arguments for free-market economics, lower taxes and deregulated financial markets had been adopted across the nation’s political spectrum. Unemployment Increase The transition was painful. Unemployment peaked at more than 3 million in the mid-1980s, and many places in the north of the country that had been world centers of manufacturing saw their decline accelerate.

“Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world,” Tony Blair, whose Labour Party ousted the Tories from power in 1997, said in a statement on his website. “Margaret was such a leader. Her global impact was vast. And some of the changes she made in Britain were, in certain respects at least, retained by the 1997 Labour government, and came to be implemented by governments around the world.” Thatcher will be given a ceremonial funeral with military honors, to be held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. A similar funeral was held for the Queen Mother in 2002. No date was announced. ‘The Greatest’ “She did not just lead our country, she saved our country,” Cameron said in televised comments from Madrid. “I believe she’ll go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister.” After winning three elections, Thatcher was forced out of office by her own party after she refused to compromise either on her policies toward Europe or on a property tax that had led to mass non-payment and violent riots.

“Always a warrior rather than a healer, her deeply ideological determination alienated those who believed in consensus rather than in confrontation,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and author of “The Conservative Party From Thatcher To Cameron” (2010). “But her policies and her personality ushered in changes -- social, economic, political, diplomatic and even military -- so profound that the consequences will continue to play out for decades, even centuries, to come.” She formed a close bond with President Ronald Reagan, whose time in office and political ideology coincided with her own. ‘Political Soulmates’ “Ronnie and Margaret were political soulmates, committed to freedom and resolved to end Communism,” Nancy Reagan, the president’s widow, said in a statement. “As prime minister, Margaret had the clear vision and strong determination to stand up for her beliefs at a time when so many were afraid to ‘rock the boat.’ As a result, she helped to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of millions of people.” Though physically limited by a series of strokes, Thatcher attended the former president’s funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington in June 2004.

“We have lost a great president, a great American and a great man, and I have lost a dear friend,” she said in a videotaped message played during the tribute, referring to Reagan as “Ronnie” and “the Great Liberator.” Nuclear Missiles Reagan and Thatcher were both closely involved with Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who evolved from adversary to ally. In 1979, she agreed to place U.S. nuclear missiles in Britain amid protests across Western Europe. Her tough line on the Soviet Union earned her the Iron Lady nickname in the Soviet press. “If you lead a country like Britain, a strong country, a country which has taken the lead in world affairs in good times and in bad, a country that is always reliable, then you have to have a touch of iron about you,” she said. Gorbachev praised Thatcher yesterday, describing her as a “brilliant” individual. While their contacts were “difficult” at first, “gradually the relationship turned more human, becoming increasingly more friendly,” he said in a statement on his fund’s website.

“At the end we managed to reach a mutual understanding and that made a contribution to changing the atmosphere between our country and the west and ending the Cold War.” EU Relations Her relations with European leaders were strained. While contemporaries such as French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl worked for a politically united Europe, Thatcher called for a network of individual states joined only as a free-trade area, like the North American Free Trade Agreement. The debate about whether Britain should stay part of an EU seeking an ever-closer union or leave has been a recurring theme in British politics since she left office. In 1984, she won a permanent rebate of Britain’s yearly contributions, telling European leaders, “I want my money back.” She later argued against Britain abandoning the pound for the European single currency. “She had an immovable willingness, an indomitable character -- that’s why we called her the Iron Lady,” former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing told journalists yesterday. “She didn’t have much consideration for the people she was talking to because she thought they were weaker than her.

With Helmut Schmidt we accepted the rebate so that was a success for Mrs Thatcher.” ‘Great Hurt’ Underscoring the bitterness she provoked among adversaries, Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s former political wing, yesterday recalled “great hurt” she’d caused. “In Ireland, her espousal of old draconian militaristic policies prolonged the war and caused great suffering,” he said in a statement. She predicted in the early 1970s that no woman would lead the country in her lifetime. Before the decade ended, she had become the country’s first -- and so far only -- female prime minister. Her rise from a grocer’s daughter to prime minister was dramatized in the 2011 film “The Iron Lady.” Meryl Streep won the best-actress Oscar for her portrayal of Thatcher both in office and in her declining years, as she began to suffer from dementia. “In politics if you want anything said, ask a man,” Thatcher said in 1975. “If you want anything done, ask a woman.” Born in Grantham Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on Oct.

13, 1925, in Grantham, a town in the east of England. She said her father’s small business was a seminal influence on her views, including her emphasis on prudent economic management. During World War II, she graduated with a chemistry degree from Somerville College at the University of Oxford and worked as a research chemist. In 1951, she married businessman Denis Thatcher and gave birth to twins, Carol and Mark, two years later. During the decade she trained as a tax lawyer while looking for a chance to get into Parliament. Denis Thatcher died in 2003, at age 88. After losing her first election in 1950 and again the following year, Thatcher entered parliament in 1959 representing Finchley, a north London suburb. At the time she was one of 25 women in Parliament, 4 percent of the total. Political Ladder After putting her foot on the lowest rung of government as a parliamentary bag-carrier in 1961, she rose through the ranks once the Conservatives lost power in 1964, becoming one of its leading spokesmen in 1967.

When the Conservatives returned to power in 1970, Thatcher, then 44, joined the Cabinet as secretary of state for education. She was the only woman around the Cabinet table, a situation she later perpetuated for all but one year of her 11 as prime minister. To cut costs, she abolished a government program that provided free milk in schools for children older than age 7, earning the nickname “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.” The 1974 general election defeat of Prime Minister Edward Heath after a series of policy reversals left Conservative lawmakers ready for an alternative. Thatcher had begun to deal with some of her deficiencies, including a voice that the journalist Clive James described as being “like a cat sliding down a blackboard.” She challenged Heath for the party’s leadership in 1975 and won. Car Bomb She served as opposition leader for four years, formulating free-market economic policies influenced by Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek and University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

Even in opposition she got a taste of the battles to come when, weeks before the 1979 general election, the Irish National Liberation Army used a car bomb to kill her friend, fellow lawmaker and former campaign manager Airey Neave. The start of 1979 was dubbed “the winter of discontent.” Much of the country was in chaos, with those on strike including water and rail workers, truckers and oil tanker drivers, ambulance personnel and gravediggers, teachers, dock workers and garbage collectors. Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan considered declaring a state of emergency until colleagues persuaded him not to. Under those circumstances, it wasn’t difficult for Thatcher to persuade voters it was time for a change in the May general election. Once in office, she faced the more difficult challenge of convincing government officials, and her own ministers, of the need to cut spending. Documents from the time show that while Cabinet members agreed in principle to the need for 10 percent staff reductions, when asked to deliver them in their own departments, most resisted. ‘Fire, Fury’ Reluctant ministers weren’t the only focus of her ire.

In 1980 she accused the governor of the Bank of England, Gordon Richardson, of blocking her policy of controlling money supply. One of his aides later recalled her “breathing fire and fury” during a meeting. The country fell into recession in 1980, with gross domestic product contracting for five consecutive quarters. As joblessness rose, Thatcher’s popularity plummeted. She didn’t flinch. Responding to calls from within her own party to change her policies, as Heath had done, she told the 1980 Conservative Party conference: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” Job Losses One of her main domestic policies involved reducing the state’s role in the economy by privatizing state-owned companies. This, with her rejection of Keynesian stimulus policies in favor of a focus on controlling inflation, and a desire to cut the public-sector workforce, drove up joblessness. Unemployment reached 11.9 percent in the middle of the decade, still its highest-ever rate. The Thatcher image of inflexibility, which has hardened into legend since she left office, isn’t borne out by government documents released in recent years.

They show that in 1981 she considered giving up British involvement in Northern Ireland in the face of terrorism and hunger strikes, and in 1982 was willing to discuss peace terms with Argentina over its invasion of the Falkland Islands. The Falklands War, over a group of islands in the South Atlantic populated by a few thousand people, could have cost Thatcher her job had Britain lost. Argentina had disputed Britain’s ownership of the islands for more than a century and in 1982 occupied them in the belief the U.K. wouldn’t attempt to retake them by force. In the face of doubts about whether such an operation could be successfully mounted, Thatcher dispatched a task force. Argentine Surrender After fighting that saw ships sunk on both sides and hand-to-hand fighting on the islands, the Argentine forces surrendered. The death toll included 255 British soldiers, 649 Argentinians and three women from the islands, killed accidentally by British fire. Thatcher’s popularity soared. In 1983, she won a national election with a 143-seat majority in the 650-seat House of Commons.

During her second term, she faced a new opponent in Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, who had helped organize the strike a decade earlier that brought down Heath. In 1984, he called a national strike to protest mine closures. Thatcher didn’t waver, outlasting a violent, yearlong dispute. She then implemented rules to curb unions’ power. Privatization Program She also sold state-owned companies, making Britain the first European country to engage in a major privatization effort. British Airways Plc, Centrica Plc, British Telecommunications Plc, BP Plc and BAE Systems Plc all traced their origins as public companies to the Thatcher government. Ordinary people were encouraged to buy the shares. Thatcher also ordered the government to sell public housing units to its occupants, to create owner-occupiers, rather than tenants of the state. A third election victory came in 1987, a feat not achieved since women gained the vote on equal terms in 1928. Thatcher took it as an endorsement to continue what she now regarded as her revolution of British economic and social life.

The economy rebounded, with annual GDP growth peaking at 6.7 percent in the first quarter of 1988. Growth in the U.K. mirrored the activity in much of western Europe during Thatcher’s term of office. Poll Tax Buoyed by the successes of her previous policies, she moved to change local property taxes, producing a plan for the so-called poll tax, a flat-rate levy on every resident. The most important business stories of the day. Get Bloomberg's daily newsletter.

Question: Which British Prime Minister was nicknamed 'The Grocer' by Private Eye magazine ?
Answer: EDWARD HEATH