The death of former British prime minister Baroness Margaret Thatcher has deprived the world of one of the most defining political forces of the 20th century.
Thatcher was the first woman prime minister of Britain, winning a hat-trick of consecutive elections as a Conservative party candidate from 1979 to 1990. During this period, she managed to change not just the nature of political discourse, but also to raise the stature of Downing Street to global importance on par with America’s White House and Moscow’s Kremlin.
Born on October 13, 1925 as Margaret Roberts, she was the Member of Parliament for Finchley, north London from 1959-1992. Her father Alderman Alfred Roberts ran two grocers’ shops and a post-office and became mayor of the Lincolnshire town of Grantham in 1943, and was a profound influence on her own life.
Thatcher was fond of quoting her father’s words to her: “You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t work, girl.”
Her trademark well-groomed appearance was, like most things about her, the result of long and hard work. Supremely confident of herself in public, she was among the first leaders in Britain to know and embrace the power of the camera, delivering speeches that are still mined by today’s leaders.
Her training, first as a research chemist, and then as a barrister specialising in tax cases, made her a formidable speaker in parliamentary debates.
While “Thatcherism”, a policy her detractors often decried as a housewife’s budgeting applied to the national economy, earned her both admiration and loathing in equal measure, it was among the key philosophies that mobilised Britain into believing in the market economy.
As prime minister, Thatcher presided over the privatisation of sectors such as the railways, water supply and energy. Her policies also allowed ordinary voters to earn a stake in society by selling their council houses and snapping up shares in the newly-privatised industries like British Gas and British Telecom.
In her 1970-term as education secretary under the leadership of Ted Heath, her decision to stop the supply of free milk to school children between seven and 11 as part of spending cuts, led her to being dubbed as “Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher” by a media campaign driven by the opposition Labour party.
While she admitted she had been wrong on the milk cuts, she did personally admire the title of “The Iron Lady” given to her by the Russians. She stayed immovable against trade union unrest, famously stating that “the lady’s not for turning”.
Her decisive naval action against the Argentinian attack on the Falklands Islands in April 1982 helped her towards a landslide victory in the elections next year.
The imperialistic nature of Thatcher’s later years was to isolate the leader who started out with the image of the housewife-politician.
Her refusal to let consensus overrule her conviction was perhaps both her success and her most serious flaw.