A woman arrives to lay flowers outside Thatcher’s home yesterday.
Reuters/London
Loved or loathed in death as in life, Margaret Thatcher left no one indifferent, finding some of her most ardent admirers among her political opponents.
“Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world. Margaret was such a leader,” said Tony Blair, the centre-left Labour leader who brought his own party back to power not least by heeding the lessons of “Thatcherism”.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader whom she famously declared she could “do business with”, said their mutual understanding “contributed to a change in the atmosphere between our country and the West and to the end of the Cold War”.
Thatcher’s warm relations with Gorbachev’s direct adversary, US president Ronald Reagan, and their shared espousal of the free market and individual liberty, along with her readiness to provide a base for US nuclear missiles, gave Britain greater influence in Washington than it has normally enjoyed.
At home, Conservatives mourned the leader who set a free-market agenda in Britain and Europe and famously announced “there is no such thing as society” as she put individual enterprise and self-reliance before the state and the social safety net.
David Cameron, the prime minister who led the Conservatives back to power but without the absolute majority Thatcher enjoyed throughout her premiership, said: “We’ve lost a great prime minister, a great leader, a great Briton.
“As our first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher succeeded against all the odds, and the real thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country. And I believe she’ll go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister.”
Thatcher is remembered in Britain for resisting the idea that the European Union should move ever closer to political union, but, at a time when Britain is once again agonising over its role in Europe, EU leaders much keener on closer integration had warm words for her.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said she would be remembered “both for her contributions and her reserves to our common project.”
“She signed the Single European Act and she helped bring about the single market. She was a leading player also in bringing into the European family the central and eastern European countries which were formerly behind the Iron Curtain.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thatcher was “a pragmatic, tough and consistent person” and that these qualities had enabled her to help pull Britain out of economic crisis, for which people should be grateful despite the criticism she faced.