The Iron Lady is dead. Her place in 20th century British history as the first female PM and the victor in the 1982 Falklands War is counterbalanced for many people by her battling, confrontational style and her attempts to dismantle large parts of the postwar welfare state. Here is the initial BBC report:
Former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher has died “peacefully” at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke, her family has announced.
David Cameron called her a “great Briton” and the Queen spoke of her sadness at the death.
Lady Thatcher was Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990. She was the first woman to hold the role.
She will not have a state funeral but will be accorded the same status as Princess Diana and the Queen Mother.
The ceremony, with full military honours, will take place at London’s St Paul’s Cathedral.
The union jack above Number 10 Downing Street has been lowered to half-mast.
[. . .]
Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair called her a “towering figure”, while his successor Gordon Brown praised her “determination and resilience”.
Labour leader Ed Miliband said Lady Thatcher had been a “unique figure” who “reshaped the politics of a whole generation”.
He added: “The Labour Party disagreed with much of what she did and she will always remain a controversial figure. But we can disagree and also greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength.”
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg described Lady Thatcher as one of the “defining figures in modern British politics”, adding: “She may have divided opinion during her time in politics but everyone will be united today in acknowledging the strength of her personality and the radicalism of her politics.”
London Mayor Boris Johnson tweeted: “Very sad to hear of death of Baroness Thatcher. Her memory will live long after the world has forgotten the grey suits of today’s politics.”
UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage called Lady Thatcher a “great inspiration”, adding: “Whether you loved her or hated her nobody could deny that she was a great patriot, who believed passionately in this country and her people. A towering figure in recent British and political history has passed from the stage. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family.”
Lady Thatcher, who retired from public speaking in 2002, had suffered poor health for several years. Her husband Denis died in 2003.
Gordon Rayner and Steven Swinford report for the Telegraph:
Known as the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher governed Britain from 1979 to 1990.
She will go down in history not only as Britain’s first female prime minister, but as the woman who transformed Britain’s economy in addition to being a formidable rival on the international stage.
Lady Thatcher was the only British prime minister to leave behind a set of ideas about the role of the state which other leaders and nations strove to copy and apply.
Many features of the modern globalised economy — monetarism, privatisation, deregulation, small government, lower taxes and free trade — were all promoted as a result of policies she employed to reverse Britain’s economic decline.
Above all, in America and in Eastern Europe she was regarded, alongside her friend Ronald Reagan, as one of the two great architects of the West’s victory in the Cold War.
Of modern British prime ministers, only Lady Thatcher’s girlhood hero, Winston Churchill, acquired a higher international reputation.
History Today linked to an older post on Mrs. Thatcher’s rise to power:
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?
[. . .]
Could the first female party leader in British history become the first woman Premier? What had once seemed somehow contrary to nature was now at least a possibility. This was the era of women’s liberation, with the publication in 1970 of The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer. There was a growing demand for women to be in positions of authority outside the home, and a popular novel of 1972, The Mistress of Downing Street by Walter Harris, depicted the first female PM of Britain. 1975 was also International Women’s Year, and women had already become premiers elsewhere in the world.
Thatcher proved no match in the Commons for the wily Harold Wilson. Nor did she fare much better when the avuncular James Callaghan took over as PM in April 1976. All too often her party seemed divided and unsuccessful. It was therefore fortunate that another general election was several years off. Yet in this time she did much to make herself and her party electable.
Thatcher gained valuable publicity from a rather intemperate speech attacking the Russians as ‘bent on world domination’. When the Red Star then dubbed her the ‘Iron Lady’ she cashed in on the propaganda value of the description. Further support came when she spoke out against immigration into Britain, arguing that ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’. Her message that the state was stifling personal initiative and responsibility, and had to be rolled back, also appealed to many. In particular, she insisted, government should allow a return to free collective bargaining, while controlling inflation by limiting the money supply, as monetarists like Milton Friedman in the USA and Enoch Powell in Britain had been arguing. In short, Britain should return to ‘good housekeeping’, even if this meant defying over-mighty trade unions. The most crucial work for the Conservatives, however, was done by the Labour government.
[. . .]
By March 1979 strikes were dying down, but there was no respite for Callaghan. On 28 March his government lost a vote of confidence by a single vote and a general election was called.
The Conservatives undoubtedly presented an attractive alternative to the government. In a bid for popularity, Thatcher had agreed to change her hairstyle, her clothes and even her voice, and now the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi designed slick posters, the most effective of which showed a long dole queue, captioned ‘Labour Isn’t Working’. Nevertheless 1979 was essentially an election that Labour lost; and they lost, as Callaghan soon judged, ‘because people didn’t get their dustbins emptied, because commuters were angry about train disruption and because of too much union power’. The Conservatives gained a majority of 43 seats, with a swing of 5.6 from Labour to Tory. Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, at the age of 53.
[. . .]
‘Time and chance’ did indeed ‘happeneth’ to Margaret Thatcher, of course they did; but they did not ‘determineth’ her success in becoming Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. She showed remarkable energy and exceptional courage throughout her career, and particularly when she stood against Heath in 1975. Powell judged that she was simply ‘opposite the spot on the roulette wheel at the right time’; but it was she who put herself there while seemingly greater figures scrupled to act. Thatcher had the killer instinct. The female of the species was more deadly than the male.
