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Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013): Life and Death of the Iron Lady

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Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party and newly elected British Prime Minister, delivers a speech, 1979. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

14 min

Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister, died in London on 8 April 2013. Coming to power in the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher patiently and sometimes courageously implemented far-reaching economic and social reforms, tearing apart the left-right consensus based on the cult of the welfare state and the omnipotence of the trade unions that has characterized British political life since the end of the Second World War.

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It established "Thatcherism" as a practice of governance based on economic liberalism and labour market flexibility. Her successors, even those from the Labour left, have strayed little from this liberal doxa for fear of alienating the British population, which is largely committed to Margaret Thatcher's individualistic vision of society. "Society does not exist," she liked to say, calling on every citizen to assume his responsibilities instead of waiting to be taken over by the state.

The recent popular success of The Iron Lady (2012), which tells the story of the life and meteoric political rise of Mrs. Thatcher, starring American actress Meryl Streep, testifies to the important place occupied by the late Prime Minister in the British collective memory. This biographical film focuses on Thatcher's political thought, without forgetting to draw the public's attention to the extraordinary destiny of this woman of modest origin who, by sheer force of will, triumphed over the obstacles with which her path was strewn.

Popular roots

The youngest daughter of a middle-class couple, Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on 13 October 1925 in the small Midlands town of Grantham. Her mother was a seamstress and her father owned a family grocery store where the girls from the house came to lend a hand every day on the way home from school. The education received from this Methodist father, imbued with the Protestant ethic of work and merit, forged the philosophy of life of the future Prime Minister.

The father's active involvement in the affairs of the city of which he would become mayor was also not unrelated to his daughter's discovery of politics as a means of improving the lives of his fellow citizens. At the age of 13, when the other girls in her class dreamed of Prince Charming, Margaret expressed the desire to become a politician and one day sit in Parliament as an MP, like her hero, a certain Winston Churchill!

Margaret married wealthy industrialist Denis Thatcher in 1951. AFP

However, growing up in an England still largely feudal politically and where the responsibility for the management of the country was in the hands of an almost exclusively male elite, born in privilege and money, the young Margaret will have a long struggle to fight to achieve her ambition.

But this ambition will not cease to inhabit her, in Grantham, then at the University of Oxford where she enters in 1943 with a scholarship to study chemistry. She was quickly elected president of the Conservative students' association (the Tories). Her first political skirmishes date from this time when she campaigned for the Tory candidate for mayor of Oxford. She joined the Conservative Party, while making her professional debut as a chemist. But chemistry wasn't quite his cup of tea. She retrained by attending night law classes and passed the bar exam in December 1953. The practice of the profession of lawyer, as a specialist in tax law, brings her closer to the world of finance and companies of which she will remain a faithful defender throughout her reign.

In 1951, she married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy industrialist, with whom she had twin children, Mark and Carole. This marriage of convenience rather than love allowed Margaret, now "Mrs. Thatcher", to leave her environment and assert herself as a free woman, emancipated from domestic chores, which left her time to devote herself fully to the main passion of her life, which was politics.

The first steps in political life

Margaret Thatcher's real entry into the national political scene dates back to 1950 when she won her party's nomination to stand for parliament. At 25, she is the youngest woman candidate in the legislative election. Unfortunately, the seat his party assigned to him was a Labour stronghold.

Despite the fierce fight that the young woman is leading to win the riding, she will not be elected, but will instead be known to the general public and the media of which she will become the darling for a time. However, she had to wait until 1959 to be elected to the House of Commons, thus fulfilling her childhood dream. She became MP for Finchley, north London, and also entered the government led by Harold Macmillan as Secretary of State for Pensioners.

A brilliant parliamentarian, she rose rapidly in the hierarchy of her party. The then Tory leader Edward Heath took her under his wing, bringing her into his shadow cabinet where she dealt between 1965-70 with issues related to energy policy, then transport and education. When the Conservative Party won the election in 1970, Heath was appointed Prime Minister. Thatcher joined the government as Minister of Education. She leads an ultra-liberal policy at the head of her ministry and makes cuts in the education budget, sparking waves of protests among parents and young people. For abolishing the tradition in primary schools of serving a glass of milk to children daily, she was nicknamed the "milk thief".

It had to face the first popular protests. Protesters chanted under the windows of her ministry: "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher", a nickname that is the first of many jeers that Thatcher will be the target of throughout her political career. "The Iron Lady" is the best known, probably because it corresponds to the inflexibility and strength of character she showed as Prime Minister. For the record, remember that it was the Russian media that were the first to give him the nickname "The Iron Lady" following his acerbic speeches denouncing communism.

To the top

The 1970s were a difficult time for Britain. The country is sinking into economic stagnation: hyperinflation, budget deficit, declining productivity, unemployment, repeated strikes... "Britain may be the first country to move from development to underdevelopment," read a headline in The Guardian. It was in this context that Margaret Thatcher, who was one of the right-wing think-tanks thinking about ways to restore public finances, carried out a putsch within the Tories to take the reins of the party in 1975. She maneuvered shrewdly and sent back to her beloved studies her former mentor and Tory President Edward Heath, who had not yet recovered from his 1974 election defeat at the hands of Labour.

For the next four years, Thatcher prepared herself intellectually to govern the country, drawing on the neoliberal economic thought whose gurus of the time were Friedrich von Hayek (Nobel Prize in Economics 1974), Karl Popper, Milton Friedman. She parted ways with the leading figures in her party who favoured the welfare state, which she believed was the main cause of the country's economic decline. She surrounded herself with advisers, attached as she did to the virtues of free markets and entrepreneurship that would be the theoretical foundations of the conservative revolution she wanted to unleash in the country.

It was helped by a new outbreak of strikes that forced the Labour government to call early general elections in the summer of 1979. The winter of 1978-79 had been harsh and punctuated by protests, leading observers to describe it as a "winter of discontent", an expression borrowed from Shakespeare. The country is threatened by chaos and bankruptcy. The English want a break and give their votes massively to the Conservative Party which promises order and employment. On 4 May 1979, the Queen appointed the leader of the Tories Prime Minister and entrusted him with the task of forming the new government of the kingdom.

A first at 10, Downing Street!

At the head of her country's executive since 1979, Margaret Thatcher broke two records. She was the first woman in the history of the oldest democracy in the world to become prime minister. She was also the first British Prime Minister to serve three successive terms. At the beginning of her reign, she also broke records of unpopularity for a newly elected Prime Minister, imposing painful fundamental reforms from the outset. These aim to clean up the economy by drastically reducing public spending and disengaging the State from entire sectors of industry. Unprofitable traditional industries are closed and others privatized. At the same time, many social gains are being abolished, particularly in the areas of health and education.

The Thatcherite revolution is underway, but its first consequences are catastrophic, with a record number of bankrupt companies and soaring unemployment jumping from one million to threefold. Riots broke out, particularly in Brixton (1981) where Margaret Thatcher's police used great means to bring peace. Criticism came from all sides, but the "iron lady" was inflexible in refusing to change her policy under pressure from the street.

The turning point came in the spring of 1982 with the outbreak of the Falklands conflict. As a good strategist, the Prime Minister seized the opportunity to reaffirm the lost greatness of the British. It sent troops to regain control of the British Isles in the South Atlantic, which had been seized by Argentine generals. The victory and the return to the status quo ante of the Falklands restored the image of Margaret Thatcher, who was triumphantly re-elected in 1983.

She is using her newfound popularity to give new impetus to her policy of disengagement from the State and the promotion of the private sector by lowering the tax burden which had proved to be a major obstacle to business creation. It is privatizing state-controlled enterprises and promoting the rise of genuine popular capitalism. These measures have resulted in the emergence of a particularly dynamic tertiary sector of which the City of London is today the flagship. The British economy returned to growth in the mid-1980s, productivity increased, but the reforms undertaken by the government favoured investors above all and accentuated social inequalities.

The miners' strike of 1984-85 was the big deal of Margaret Thatcher's second term. The Prime Minister's confrontational policy with the powerful mining unions opposed to the closure of the mines led to the year-long strike. With a prime minister straight in his boots, the confrontation gradually turned to the disadvantage of the unions who had failed to block the country. Thatcher took advantage of this strike, which often had disastrous consequences for families, to pass laws that permanently reduced the power of the unions. From now on, it will have a free hand to pursue its most radical reforms to ensure labour market flexibility.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan before the Camp David meeting in the United States on December 22, 1984. AFP / Archives UPI

Internationally, the Thatcher years were characterised by a rapprochement between Britain and the United States. Thatcher formed a very strong personal relationship with Ronald Reagan who was elected President of the United States in 1980. Reagan dubbed the British Prime Minister "the best man in England."

It shared his anti-interventionist orientations in the economic field and especially his visceral anti-communism. The two leaders worked closely together to weaken the Soviet Union and gave new impetus to the Cold War. This policy of rapprochement with the American ally was popular in England, as was Thatcher's active support for NATO and the independent nuclear deterrent.

The Prime Minister was less successful on Europe and had to fight tooth and nail to reduce his country's financial contribution to the European Commission's budget. She won, but her opposition to the advent of a federal Europe divided the Conservatives between Eurosceptics and Europhiles, accelerating the fall of the second Thatcher government in 1987. Margaret Thatcher was hostile to the single European currency and strongly defended her vision of a Europe of homelands.

Within the Commonwealth, she was not much appreciated either, especially by African heads of state who regretted her systematic opposition to international sanctions against the pro-apartheid regime in South Africa.

The fall and after

In 1987, Margaret Thatcher was re-elected, despite a high level of unemployment in the country (11%). She is the first British Prime Minister of the twentieth century to be re-elected for a third term. It is pursuing its policy of privatisation of national companies (including British Telecom, British Gas, BP, British Airways, British Steel, water and electricity utilities). But his policies are increasingly controversial and are causing tension within his own party. It was contested by its own ministers, the most important of whom (Geoffrey Howe, Michael Heseltine) left the government.

Poster of the film The Iron Lady starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. DR

Weakened by the project to create a new local tax ("poll tax") which proved particularly unpopular, Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign in 1990, after having governed the country for eleven years with an iron fist. As she had not prepared her succession, she was replaced by John Major, a consensual but unconvinced personality.

Thatcher remained an MP until 1992, representing Finchley in the House of Commons, where she had been the standard-bearer in Parliament continuously since 1959. She did not run for the legislative elections in 1992. Ennobled by the Queen, she now sits in the House of Lords. At the same time, she created her foundation that allowed her to travel around the world, giving speeches on the virtues of economic liberalism and democracy. She also wrote her memoirs, which became bestsellers.

After her resignation as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher continued to influence British politicians, both those from the Conservative camp, as well as those representing the Labour opposition. Tony Blair, who led Labour to power in 1997 after twenty years of Conservative government, publicly acknowledged the merit of the Thatcher years. But Thatcher's record is a mixed one.

She left her successors with an economically strong, but profoundly unequal England. Social inequalities widened during the 80s, with many social gains removed, especially in the areas of health and education. According to historians, Thatcher's contempt for technocrats and federalists in Brussels was at the root of England's complicated relations with the European Union.

Dressed eternally in a light blue suit which is the favorite color of the Tories, Margaret Thatcher will remain for many English women the woman who broke the glass ceiling to rise to the top of political England populated by men. This is also the bias of the particularly moving film that Phyllida Lloyd and Abi Morgan dedicated to the "Iron Lady". In one of the most memorable scenes of the film, we see the young Margaret, magnificently played by Meryl Streep, accept Denis Thatcher's marriage proposal in 1950, without forgetting to remind her that she will never be "one of those women who spend most of their time in their corner, at the back of the kitchen, to do the dishes."

First published, April 08, 2013.

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