Farewell to the Iron Lady
Despite her modest origins as the daughter of a Lincolnshire grocer, power came naturally to Thatcher – and others knew it. In fact, as far back as the early 1950s, when at just 26 she was contesting the Labour stronghold of Dartford, one colourful story tells how she met a fortune teller at a village fete. ‘You will be great,’ the soothsayer told her. ‘Great as Churchill.’
And so it was. Battling her way to power in 1979, she overcame institutional chauvinism and bitter party rivalries to face economic calamity, militant union barons and Argentina’s 1982 Falklands invasion. Decades after the age of empire, and following years of financial decline, her supporters even dared to hope that she had made Britain great again.
But she was also a deeply divisive character. Fearless in the face of public discontent, she put the long-term good of the nation ahead of short-term political gain. And it made her countless enemies. Fellow Tory Edward Heath called Thatcher ‘that bloody woman’, colleagues dubbed her Attila the Hen, and when she scrapped free milk in schools, The Sun newspaper dubbed her ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’.
As the IRA’s number one target, she only narrowly escaped death when a republican bomb ripped through her Brighton hotel during the 1984 Conservative Party conference. No wonder she called being prime minister a ‘lonely job’.
Not that it mattered. In her foreword to the 1979 Conservative manifesto, she had written of her ‘feeling of helplessness, that a once great nation has somehow fallen behind’. And once in power, nothing, it seemed, would be allowed to stand in the way of her transforming this age of helplessness into a new era of hope. Whatever the cost.
Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on 13 October 1925 and raised by her parents, Beatrice and Alfred, above the family’s grocery shop in Grantham, Lincolnshire. (Her older sister Muriel died in 2004.)
It was the type of background that Napoleon – who famously dismissed England as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ – would have sneered at. But it would also shape her political ideology. Brought up a strict Methodist – her father was a lay preacher – she was taught to value thrift and hard work over all else. Which is just as well. By the mid-1970s, Britain was fast becoming an economic basket case.
Margaret Thatcher had started her career as a chemist – and had been part of a team that developed soft-scoop ice cream. But after years of trying, she finally became an MP (for Finchley) in 1959.
Despite the overt chauvinism of politics at the time, she rose ever upwards and in 1975 defeated Ted Heath in a leadership ballot. She had, however, taken control of the opposition Tory party during what was, for all intents and purposes, a national crisis.
Under the Labour government of 1974-9, Britain was pummelled by strikes and on the verge of bankruptcy. In 1976, the nation was forced to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. And by the end of 1978, the country faced the long, bitter Winter of Discontent.
And so, when she became Britain’s first female Prime Minister in 1979, Thatcher’s cupboard was bare. Her draconian economic policies, which included increasing interest rates and slashing public sector spending, put Britain on the road to recovery. But as unemployment initially soared, her popularity plummeted and tens of thousands suffered.
As some cried for a change of tack, however, she responded with customary grit: ‘You turn if you want to,’ she said in 1980. ‘This lady’s not for turning’. The Iron Lady – as she had been dubbed in the communist media – had come of age.
As her close colleague and ally Norman Tebbit told The Lady: ‘What set her apart from the politicians of today was that she asked for the facts first, and had the discussion later.’
This mettle certainly paid dividends. As the economy recovered, and her popularity soared following Britain’s nail-biting victory in the 1982 Falklands War, it appeared that ‘Thatcherism’ had been vindicated.
Newsweek magazine ran a cover picture of aircraft carrier HMS Hermes under the headline ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, Britain appeared to regain its standing in the world, and the 1983 election resulted in a Tory landslide.
With a majority of 144 in the Commons – and Deputy Prime Minister Willie Whitelaw helping her to unite the party (she once said ‘every prime minister needs a Willie’) Thatcher could now really go to work.
Almost immediately, she turned her guns on the unions, limiting their powers with groundbreaking new legislation. And the unions struck back.
In March 1984, members of the National Union of Mineworkers, under Arthur Scargill, walked out – crucially, without holding a national ballot – in what would become one of the defining moments of the Thatcher premiership. The Iron Lady, as ever, refused to budge.
‘We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands,’ she said. ‘We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.’
The strike, which left 20,000 injured and saw 11,000 arrested, lasted a year and was described as being ‘the nearest Britain came to civil war for 400 years’. Scargill’s militant tactics, however, cost him public support and dozens of mines were closed. It was a hammer blow against the unions, but also left tens of thousands unemployed. Many communities have never recovered.
By the mid-1980s, the other name on everyone’s lips was Sid. The ‘If you see Sid…tell him’ advertising campaign was launched in 1986 to encourage the nation to buy shares in the newly-privatised British Gas. But gas was only the tip of the iceberg. British Petroleum, British Aerospace, Jaguar, British Telecom, British Airways; all were sold off to private investors as Thatcher privatised the nation’s cumbersome public utilities.
She also gave council house tenants the opportunity to buy their own homes – and hundreds of thousands did, joining the nation’s booming middle class. It was an age of opportunity when, if the increasingly affluent City workers were anything to go by, greed really was good.
Thatcher also became a leading player on the world stage. It was her beloved husband, Denis, who first put her in touch with Ronald Reagan, after the two met at an event in the late 1960s.
But when Reagan won the presidency, ‘Maggie’ and ‘Ronnie’ formed a close friendship. She was, he joked, ‘the best man in England’.
It was an historic alliance, and played a vital role in facing down the USSR, establishing détente with progressive Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and finally bringing down the Berlin Wall in November 1989. But the Iron Lady, who was becoming rabidly anti- European and for whom the introduction of the Poll Tax had been an unmitigated disaster, was now gathering powerful enemies in her own fold.
In 1990, Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe resigned from her cabinet and Michael Heseltine soon launched a leadership challenge. Thatcher won a majority of the vote, but her position had been terribly weakened and on 28 November 1990, she formally resigned. It was a landmark moment for both the country and the Iron Lady herself, who left No 10 in tears.
Thatcher, however, had two loves in her life: power – and Denis. Margaret and Denis – a businessman and ‘honest-to-God right winger’ – had met in 1949, at the rather unromantic (and unladylike) Paints Trade Federation meeting, in Dartford. They had married in 1951 – their twins Carol and Mark were born in 1953 – and he was her rock for the next five decades, standing by her throughout all of her loneliest moments. (His service was recognised in 1990 when he was made a baronet.)
Leaving the House of Commons in 1992, Thatcher, who was now a baroness, entered the House of Lords. But gradually she began to retreat from public life. She suffered a series of minor strokes in 2002 and lost Denis the following year.
Ill health and short-term memory loss haunted her final years. Her legacy, however, will not be forgotten. Margaret Thatcher may have turned Britain on its head, alienating some and making enemies of many more, but, in the end, that fortune teller was right: she was great. What’s more, in a man’s world, she was a great lady.
Margaret Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013.