Biography

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher,

LG,
OM,

PC,
FRS
(born 13
October 1925)
was

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990.

She was the longest serving British Prime Minister in the
20th
century, the longest since

Gladstone, and had the longest continuous period in office since

Lord Liverpool. She is also the only woman to be Prime Minister or elected
leader of a major political party in the UK and, with

Margaret Beckett, is one of only two women to hold any of the four

great offices of state. Undoubtedly one of the most significant British
politicians in recent political history, she is also one of the most divisive,
being loved and loathed.

Early life and education

Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts in the town of

Grantham in

Lincolnshire in eastern
England. Her
father was

Alfred Roberts, who ran a grocer's shop in the town and was active in local
politics, serving as an
Alderman
and was a
Methodist
lay
preacher. While officially described^{[citation needed]}
as 'Liberal
Independent', in practice he supported the local Conservatives^{[citation needed]}.
He lost his post as Alderman after the

Labour Party won control of Grantham Council in 1946. Her mother was
Beatrice Roberts née Stephenson, and she had a sister, Muriel. Thatcher was
brought up a staunch
Methodist
and has remained a
Christian
throughout her life.[1]

She did well at school, going to a girls'

grammar school (Kesteven) and then to

Somerville College,

Oxford from 1944, where she studied
Chemistry.
She became President of the

Oxford University Conservative Association in
1946, the third
woman to hold the post. She graduated with a second-class degree and worked as a
research chemist for British Xylonite and then

J. Lyons and Co., where she helped develop methods for preserving
ice cream.
She was a member of the team that developed the first soft frozen ice cream.

Political career between 1950 and 1970

At the 1950 and 1951 elections, Margaret Roberts fought the
safe
Labour seat of

Dartford, and was the youngest woman Conservative candidate. Her activity in
the Conservative Party in
Kent brought her
into contact with

Sir Denis Thatcher, whom she married, in 1951. Denis was a wealthy
businessman, and he funded his wife to read for the

Bar. She qualified as a
barrister
in 1953, the same year that her twin children,

Carol and
Mark,
were born. On returning to work, she specialised in tax issues.

Thatcher had begun to look for a safe Conservative seat, and was narrowly
rejected as candidate for

Orpington in 1954. She had several other rejections before being selected
for

Finchley in April 1958. She won the seat easily in the 1959 election and
took her seat in the

House of Commons. Unusually, her

maiden speech was in support of her

Private Member's Bill to force local councils to hold meetings in public,
which was successful. In 1961 she voted against her party's line by voting for
the restoration of
birching.

She was given early promotion to the front bench as

Parliamentary Secretary at the

Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in September 1961, keeping the
post until the Conservatives lost power in the 1964 election. When

Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down, Thatcher voted for
Edward
Heath in the leadership election over

Reginald Maudling, and was rewarded with the job of Conservative spokesman
on Housing and Land. She moved to the Shadow
Treasury
Team after 1966.

Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support
Leo Abse's
Bill to decriminalise male

homosexuality, and she voted in favour of
David
Steel's Bill to legalise
abortion.
However, she was opposed to the abolition of

capital punishment and voted against making
divorce more
easily attainable. She made her mark as a conference speaker in 1966 with a
strong attack on the taxation policy of the Labour Government as being steps
"not only towards
Socialism,
but towards
Communism". She won promotion to the

Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Fuel Spokesman in 1967, and was then promoted to
shadow Transport and, finally, Education before the

1970 election.

In Heath's Cabinet

When the Conservatives won the 1970 general election, Thatcher became

Secretary of State for Education and Science. In her first months in office,
forced to administer a cut in the Education budget, she was responsible for the
abolition of universal free milk in schools. Recently released Cabinet papers
show that she spoke against the move in Cabinet, but was forced, due to the
concept of collective responsibility, to implement the will of her fellow
ministers.

This provoked a storm of public protest. Her term was marked by many
proposals for more local education authorities to abolish

grammar schools, of which she approved, and adopt

comprehensive secondary education, even though this was widely perceived as
a left-wing policy. Thatcher also defended the budget of the

Open University from attempted cuts.

After the Conservative defeat in

February 1974, she was promoted again, to Shadow Environment Secretary. In
this job she promoted a policy of abolishing the

rating system that paid for local government services, which proved a
popular policy within the Conservative Party.

However, she agreed with Sir
Keith
Joseph that the Heath Government had lost control of

monetary policy. After Heath lost the

second election that year, Joseph decided to challenge his leadership but
later dropped out. Thatcher then decided that she would enter the race.
Unexpectedly she outpolled Heath on the first ballot and won the job on the
second, in February 1975. She appointed Heath's preferred successor

William Whitelaw as her deputy.

As Leader of the Opposition

On 19
January 1976,
she made a speech in
Kensington
Town Hall in which she made a scathing attack on the
Soviet
Union. The most famous part of her speech ran:

"The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring
the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The
men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow
of public opinion.

They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before
guns."

In response, the Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper

Krasnaya Zvezda ("Red
Star") gave her the nickname "Iron
Lady", which was soon publicised by
Radio
Moscow world service. She took delight in the name and it soon became
associated with her image as an unwavering and steadfast character.

At first she appointed many Heath supporters in the Shadow Cabinet and
throughout her administrations sought to have a cabinet that reflected the broad
range of opinions in the Conservative Party. Thatcher had to act cautiously to
convert the Conservative Party to her
monetarist
beliefs. She reversed Heath's support for

devolved government for
Scotland.
In an interview she gave to

Granada Television's

World in Action programme in 1978, she spoke of her concerns about
immigrants "swamping" the UK, arousing particular controversy at the time. Her
expressed sentiments have been viewed by some as drawing supporters of the

British National Front to the Conservative fold.^{[citation needed]}

During the 1979 General Election, most opinion polls showed that voters
preferred

James Callaghan as Prime Minister even as the Conservative Party maintained
a lead in the polls. The Labour Government ran into difficulties with the
industrial disputes, strikes, high unemployment, and collapsing public services
during the winter of 1978-9, dubbed the 'Winter
of Discontent'. The Conservatives used campaign posters with slogans such as
"Labour Isn't Working" (see[2])
to attack the government's record over unemployment and its perceived
over-regulation of the labour market.

The Callaghan government fell after a successful

Motion of no confidence in spring 1979, and following the

general election, the Conservatives won a working majority in the House of
Commons and Thatcher became the United Kingdom's first female Prime Minister.

Post-political career

In 1992, Margaret Thatcher was raised to the peerage by the conferment of the
life
barony of Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, upon her. It
is interesting that she did not take an herary title, as she recommended for

Harold Macmillan, later Earl of Stockton, on his ninetieth birthday in 1984,
and become the Countess Thatcher or something similar. She has explained that
she thought she hadn't sufficient means to 'support' an herary title. By
virtue of the life barony she entered the

House of Lords. She made a series of speeches in the Lords criticising the

Maastricht Treaty. She described it as "a treaty too far" and in June 1993
told the Lords: "I could never have signed this treaty".[7]
She also advocated a referendum on the treaty, citing
A. V.
Dicey, since all three main parties were in favour of it and that therefore
the people should have their say.[8]

In August 1992 she called for NATO to stop the Serbian assault on Gorazde and
Sarajevo in order to end "ethnic cleansing" and to preserve the Bosnian state.
She claimed what was happening in Bosnia was "reminiscent of the worst excesses
of the Nazis".^[3]
In December of that same year she warned that there could be a "holocaust" in
Bosnia and after the first massacre at
Srebrenica
in April 1993 Thatcher thought it was a "killing field the like of which I
thought we would never see in Europe again". She reportedly said to Douglas Hurd,
the Foreign Secretary: "Douglas, Douglas, you would make

Neville Chamberlain look like a warmonger".^[4]

She had already been honoured by the Queen in 1990, shortly after her
resignation as Prime Minister, when she was appointed to the

Order of Merit, one of the UK's highest distinctions. In addition, her
husband, Denis Thatcher, had been given a
baronetcy in
1991 (ensuring that their son Mark would inherit a title). This was the first
creation of a baronetcy since 1965. In 1995 Thatcher was raised to the

Order of the Garter, the United Kingdom's highest order of
Chivalry.

In July 1992, she was hired by tobacco giant

Philip Morris Companies, now the
Altria Group,
as a "geopolitical consultant" for US$250,000 per year and an annual
contribution of US$250,000 to her Foundation.

From 1993 to 2000, she served as Chancellor of the

College of William and Mary, which was established by
Royal
Charter in 1693. She was also Chancellor of the

University of Buckingham, the UK's only private university. She retired from
the post in 1998.

She wrote her
memoirs in two volumes, The Path to Power and The Downing Street
Years. In 1993 The Downing Street Years were televised by BBC, where
she described her resignation as "treachery with a smile on its face".

Although she remained supportive in public, in private she made her
displeasure with many of John Major's policies plain, and her views were
conveyed to the press and widely reported. She was critical of the rise in
public spending under Major and his more favourable attitude to

European integration.

In 1998, Thatcher made a highly publicised visit to the former Chilean
dictator

Augusto Pinochet, while he was under house arrest in Surrey, during which
she expressed her support for and friendship with him (see

[9]). Pinochet had been a key ally in the

Falklands war. During the same year, she made a £2,000,000 donation to

Cambridge University for the endowment of a Margaret Thatcher Chair in
Entrepreneurial Studies. She also donated the archive of her personal papers to

Churchill College, Cambridge.

She made many speaking engagements around the world, and she actively
supported the Conservative election campaign in 2001. In 2002 she published
Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World detailing her thoughts on

international relations since her resignation in 1990. The chapters on the
European Union were particularly controversial; she called for a fundamental
renegotiation of Britain's membership to preserve the UK's sovereignty and, if
that failed, for Britain to leave and join

NAFTA. These chapters were serialised in The Times on Monday, 18
March and caused a political furore for the rest of the week until on Friday, 22
March it was announced she was advised by her doctors to make no more public
speeches on health grounds, having suffered several small strokes, which left
her in a very frail state.

She remains active in various Thatcherite groups, including the

Conservative Way Forward group, the
Bruges
Group and the

European Foundation. She was widowed on
26 June
2003.

On June 11, 2004, Thatcher delivered a moving tribute via videotape to former
United States President

Ronald Reagan at his

state funeral at the National Cathedral in

Washington, D.C.

On 13
October 2005
Thatcher marked her 80th birthday with a celebratory party at the

Mandarin Oriental Hotel in
Hyde Park
where the guests included Her Majesty the Queen and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh.
There, Geoffrey Howe, now Lord Howe of Aberavon, commented on her political
career: "Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so
that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was
accepted as irreversible."

Legacy

Many British citizens remember where they were and what they were doing when
they heard that Margaret Thatcher had resigned and what their reaction was. She
was a polarising figure, who brought out strong reactions from people. Likewise,
her legacy is highly disputed. ^{[citation needed]}

Some people cr her macroeconomic reforms with rescuing the British
economy from the stagnation of the 1970s and admire her committed
radicalism
on social issues. Others see her as authoritarian and egotistical. She is
accused of dismantling the

Welfare State and of destroying much of the UK's manufacturing base, whilst
consigning millions to long-term unemployment. Though supporters say it is quite
the opposite.

The first charge reflects her government's rhetoric more than its actions, as
it actually did little to reduce welfare expenditure, despite its desire to do
so. The second charge may be credible in that there was a major fall in
manufacturing employment, and some industries almost disappeared, though
manufacturing does take a smaller share of employment and GDP as an economy
modernises and the service sector expands. The UK was widely seen as the "sick
man of Europe" in the 1970s, and some argued that it would be the first
developed nation to return to the status of a developing country. Instead, the
UK emerged as one of the most successful economies in modern Europe. Most people
today realize that this was due to Margaret Thatcher's policies.

Critics of this view believe that the economic problems of the 1970s were
exaggerated, and were caused largely by factors outside any UK government's
control, such as high
oil
prices caused by the
oil crisis,
leading to the high
inflation
which damaged the economies of nearly all major industrial countries.
Accordingly, they also argue that the economic downturn was not the result of
socialism
and trade
unions, as

Thatcherite supporters claim. Critics also argue that the Thatcher period in
government coincided with a general improvement in the world economy, and the
buoyant tax revenues from
North
Sea oil (although this is sometimes a double-edged sword; see
Dutch
disease), and that these were the real cause of the improved economic
environment of the 1980s rather than Margaret Thatcher's policies.

Perceptions of Margaret Thatcher are mixed in the view of the British public.
A clear illustration of the divisions of opinion over Thatcher's leadership can
be found in recent television polls: Thatcher appears at number 16 in the 2002
List of "100
Greatest Britons", which was the highest placing for a living person. She
also appears at number 3 in the 2003 List of "100
Worst Britons", which was confined to those living, narrowly missing out on
the top spot, which went to

Labour

Prime Minister
Tony Blair.
In the end, however, few could argue that there was any woman who played a more
important role on the world stage in the 20th century. In perhaps the sincerest
form of flattery, Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, himself a thrice-elected
Prime Minister, has implicitly and explicitly acknowledged her importance by
continuing many of her economic policies. Thatcher herself indirectly
acknowledged Blair during a Conservative leadership contest when she said
They...(The Conservative Party)...don't need someone that can beat Mr. Blair,
they need someone LIKE Mr. Blair.

Another view divides her economic legacy into two parts: market efficiency
and long-term growth. The first part, due to her reforms, is quite
controversial. While the unemployment rate did eventually come down, it came
after initial job losses and radical labour market reforms. These included laws
that weakened trade unions and the deregulation of financial markets, which
certainly succeeded in returning the City to a leadership position as a European
financial centre, and her push for increased competition in telecommunications
and other public utilities. Long-term growth, according to available data, is
considered low, due to lack of civil research and development spending, lowered
education standards and ineffective job-training policies.

Many of her policies have proved to be divisive. In much of Scotland, Wales
and the urban and former mining areas of northern England she is still reviled.
Many people remember the hardships of the miners' strike, which destroyed many
mining communities, and the decline of industry as service industries boomed.

While Thatcher enjoyed more support in much of the rural and affluent
south-west, this was not extended to the less affluent and more industralised
City of
Plymouth, where it was thought that up to a quarter of the population was
employed in the defence industry, particularly in

Devonport Dockyard. The privatisation of the dockyard's management in 1987
(handed over to DML)
and the consequent massive job losses were largely blamed on the Thatcher
government, resulting in a drop in support for the Conservatives from 44% in
1979 to 29% in 1987.

Negative opinions of Thatcher in the mining and industrial communities were
reflected in the 1987 election, which she won by a landslide through winning
large numbers of seats in southern England and the rural farming areas of
northern England while winning few seats in the remaining areas of the country.
Through the

Common Agricultural Policy British agriculture was (and remains) heavily
subsidised while other failing parts of the economy did not receive similar
support.

Perceptions abroad broadly follow the same political divisions. On the left,
Margaret Thatcher is generally regarded as somebody who used force to quash
social movements, who imposed social reforms that disregarded the interests of
the
working class and instead favoured the wealthier elements of the
middle
class and business. Satirists have often caricatured her. For instance,
French singer

Renaud wrote a song, Miss Maggie, which lauded women as refraining
from many of the silly behaviours of males – and every time making an exception
for "Mrs Thatcher". She may be remembered most of all for declaring: "There is
no such thing as society"

[10] to reporter Douglas Keay, for 'Womans Own' magazine,
23
September 1987

[11],going on to emphasise the importance of families and individuals in the
fabric of British life. On the economic and political
centre
right, Thatcher is often remembered with some fondness as a conservative who
dared to confront powerful unions and removed harmful constraints on the
economy, though many do not openly claim to be following her example given the
strong feelings that highly ideological Lady Thatcher and

Thatcherism elicits in many.

Among Irish nationalists, she is generally remembered as an intransigent
figure who eschewed negotiations with the Provisional IRA who had targeted her.
Her critics believe this contributed to the length and ferocity of
the
Troubles in

Northern Ireland, despite the efforts her government made to increase Irish
involvement in the North through the Anglo-Irish Agreement.^{[citation needed]}

In 1996, the Scott Inquiry into the

Arms-to-Iraq affair investigated the Thatcher government's record in dealing
with Saddam Hussein. It revealed how £1bn of Whitehall money was used in soft
loan guatantees for British exporters to Iraq.^{[citation needed]}
The judge found that during Baghdad's protracted

invasion of Iran in the 1980s, officials destroyed documents relating to the
export of

Chieftain tank parts to Jordan which ended up in Iraq.^{[citation needed]}
Ministers clandestinely relaxed official guidelines to help private companies
sell machine tools which were used in munitions factories.^{[citation needed]}
The British company
Racal exported sophisticated

Jaguar V radios to the former Iraqi dictator's army on cr. Members of
the Conservative cabinet refused to stop lending guaranteed funds to Saddam even
after he executed a British journalist,

Farzad Bazoft, Thatcher’s cabinet minuting that they did not want to damage
British industry.^{[citation needed]}

Many on both the right and left agree that Thatcher had a transformative
effect on the British political spectrum in Britain and that her tenure had the
effect of moving the major political parties rightward.
New Labour
and Blairism
have incorporated much of the economic, social and political tenets of
"Thatcherism" in the same manner as, in a previous era, the Conservative Party
from the 1950s until the days of
Edward
Heath accepted many of the basic assumptions of the

welfare state instituted by Labour governments. The curtailing and large
scale dismantling of elements of the welfare state under Thatcher have largely
remained. As well, Thatcher's programe of

privatising

state-owned enterprises has not been reversed. Indeed, successive Tory and
Labour governments have further curtailed the involvement of the state in the
economy and have further dismantled public ownership.

For good or ill, Thatcher's impact on the
trade
union movement in Britain has been lasting with the breaking of the

miners' strike of 1984-1985 seen as a watershed moment, or even a breaking
point, for a union movement which has been unable to regain the degree of power
it exercised up to the 1970s. Unionisation rates in Britain declined under
Thatcher and have not recovered and the legislative instruments introduced to
curtail the impact of strikes has not been reversed. Instead, the Labour Party
has worked to loosen its ties to the trade union movement.

Thatcher's legacy has continued strongly to influence the Conservative Party
itself. Successive leaders, starting with
John Major,
and continuing in opposition with

William Hague,

Iain Duncan Smith and

Michael Howard, have struggled with real or imagined factions in the
Parliamentary and national party to determine what parts of her heritage should
be retained or jettisoned. The leadership of
David
Cameron in 2006
may mark an end to this fixation, which has riven the party since Thatcher left
office. In a list compiled by the left leaning magazine, the
New
Statesman in 2006, she was voted fifth in the list of "Heroes of our
time"^[5].

Contributions

As Prime Minister

1979–1983

Thatcher formed a government on
4 May
1979, with a
mandate to reverse the UK's economic decline and to reduce the role of the state
in the economy. Thatcher was incensed by one contemporary view within the
Civil
Service that its job was to manage the UK's decline from the days of

Empire, and wanted the country to assert a higher level of influence and
leadership in

international affairs. She was a
philosophic
soulmate of

Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 in the

United States, and to a lesser extent

Brian Mulroney, who was elected in 1984 in
Canada. It
seemed for a time that conservatism might be the dominant political philosophy
in the major English-speaking nations for the era.

In May 1980, one day before she was due to meet the

Irish
Taoiseach,

Charles Haughey to discuss

Northern Ireland, she announced in the

House of Commons that "the future of the constitutional affairs of

Northern Ireland is a matter for the people of Northern Ireland, this
government, this parliament and no-one else."

In 1981 a number of

Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and

Irish National Liberation Army prisoners in

Northern Ireland's

Maze prison (known in Ireland as 'Long Kesh', its previous name) went on

hunger strike to regain the status of

political prisoners, which had been revoked five years earlier.
Bobby
Sands, the first of the strikers, was elected as a

Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of

Fermanagh and South Tyrone a few weeks before he died.

Thatcher refused at first to countenance a return to political status for
republican prisoners, famously declaring "Crime is crime is crime; it is not
political." However, after nine more men had starved themselves to death and the
strike had ended, and in the face of growing anger on both sides of the border
and widespread civil unrest, some rights offered to paramilitary prisoners under
political status were restored.

Thatcher also continued the policy of "Ulsterisation"
of the previous Labour government and its

Secretary of State for Northern Ireland,
Roy Mason,
believing that the
unionists
of Northern Ireland should be at the forefront in combating

Irish republicanism. This meant relieving the burden on the mainstream
British
army and elevating the role of the

Ulster Defence Regiment and the

Royal Ulster Constabulary.

In economic policy, Thatcher started out by increasing interest rates to
drive down the money supply. She had a preference for indirect taxation over
taxes on income, and

value added tax (VAT) was raised sharply to 15%, with a resultant rise in
inflation. These moves hit businesses, especially in the manufacturing sector,
and unemployment quickly passed two million people.

Political commentators harked back to the Heath Government's "U-turn" and
speculated that Mrs Thatcher would follow suit, but she repudiated this approach
at the 1980 Conservative Party conference, telling the party: "To those waiting
with bated breath for that favourite media catch-phrase—the U-turn—I have only
one thing to say: you turn if you want to; the Lady's not for turning". That she
meant what she said was confirmed in the 1981 budget, when, despite concerns
expressed in an open letter from 364 leading economists, taxes were increased in
the middle of a recession. In January 1982, the inflation rate dropped to single
figures and

interest rates were then allowed to fall. Unemployment continued to rise,
reaching an official figure of 3.6 million — although the criteria for defining
who was unemployed were amended allowing some to estimate that unemployment in
fact hit 5 million. However,
Lord
Tebbit has suggested that, due to the high number of people claiming
unemployment benefit whilst working, he doubts whether unemployment ever reached
three million at all.

In
Argentina an unstable military junta was in power and keen on reversing its
widespread unpopularity caused by the country's poor economic performance. On
2 April
1982, it invaded
the

Falkland Islands, known to the Argentinians as Islas Malvinas, the only
invasion of a British territory since
World
War II. Argentina has

claimed the islands since an 1830s dispute on their settlement. Within days,
Thatcher sent a naval
task force
to recapture the Islands, which was successful, resulting in a wave of
patriotic
enthusiasm for her, personally, at a time when her popularity had been at an
all-time low for a serving Prime Minister.^{[citation needed]}

This "Falklands Factor," along with disunity in the opposition, was a major
factor in the wide Conservative majority in the

June 1983 general election, a political high point for the Thatcher
government.

Aiming to take advantage of the Labour split, there was a new challenge to
the political centre, the

SDP-Liberal Alliance, formed by an electoral pact between the SDP and the

Liberal Party, aiming to break the major parties' dominance and win

proportional representation. However, this grouping of uncertain cohesion
failed to make its intended breakthrough. The Conservatives won 42.4% of the
vote, a slightly smaller share of the vote than in the 1979 general election.
However, the split opposition, combined with Britain's

first past the post electoral system—in which marginal changes in vote
numbers and distribution often have disproportionate effects on the number of
seats won — translated this vote share into a Conservative
landslide.
Margaret Thatcher had won with a majority of 144 over the other parties.

1983–1987

Thatcher was committed to reducing the power of the
trade
unions but, unlike the Heath government, adopted a strategy of incremental
change rather than a single Act. Several unions launched

strikes that were wholly or partly aimed at damaging her politically.

The most significant of these was carried out, in 1984-85, by the

National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Thatcher had made preparations long in
advance for an NUM strike by building up
coal stocks, and
there were no cuts in

electricity supply, unlike 1972.
Police tactics
during the strike concerned

civil libertarians, but images of crowds of militant miners using violence
to prevent other miners from working swung public opinion against the strike.
The

Miners' Strike lasted a full year before the NUM leadership conceded without
a deal. The Tory government then went on to close all but 15 pits, before
privatisation in 1994.

In June 1984, Thatcher invited

apartheid South Africa's president,
P.W. Botha,
and foreign minister,
Pik Botha,
to Chequers
in an effort to stave off growing international pressure for the imposition of

economic sanctions against South Africa, where Britain had invested heavily.
The visit came just three months after four South African arms smugglers had
been arrested in
Coventry
and charged with offences against the United Nations mandatory arms embargo
which outlawed the export of arms to South Africa. (See

Coventry Four)

On the early morning of
October 12,
1984, the day
before her 59th birthday, Thatcher narrowly escaped from the

Brighton hotel bombing carried out by the

Provisional Irish Republican Army during the Conservative Party conference.
Five people died in the attack, including Roberta Wakeham, wife of the
government's
Chief Whip

John Wakeham, and the Conservative

MP
Sir
Anthony Berry. A prominent member of the Cabinet,

Norman Tebbit, was injured, along with his wife Margaret, who was left
paralysed. Thatcher herself would have been killed, if not for the fact that she
was using the bathroom at the exact moment that the
IRA bomb detonated.
Thatcher insisted that the conference open on time the next day and made her
speech as planned in defiance of the bombers, a gesture which won widespread
approval across the political spectrum.

On
November 15, 1985,
Thatcher signed the Hillsborough

Anglo-Irish Agreement, the first time a British government gave the Republic
of Ireland an important role to play in Northern Ireland. The agreement was
greeted with fury by Irish unionists. The

Ulster Unionists and

Democratic Unionists made an electoral pact and on
January 23,
1986, staged an
ad-hoc referendum by resigning their seats and contesting the subsequent
by-elections, losing only one, to the nationalist

SDLP. However, unlike the

Sunningdale Agreement of 1974, they found they could not bring the agreement
down by a general strike. This was another effect of the changed balance of
power in

industrial relations.

Thatcher's political and economic philosophy emphasised
free
markets and

entrepreneurialism. Since gaining power, she had experimented in selling off
a small

nationalised company, the National Freight Company, to its workers, with a
surprisingly positive response. After the 1983 election, the Government became
bolder and sold off most of the large utilities which had been in public
ownership since the late 1940s. Many in the public took advantage of
share offers,
although many sold their shares immediately for a quick profit. The policy of

privatisation, while anathema to many on the left, has become synonymous
with
Thatcherism. Wider share-ownership and council house sales became known as "popular
capitalism" to its supporters.

In the Cold
War Mrs Thatcher supported

Ronald Reagan's policies of
deterrence
against the Soviets. This contrasted with the policy of
détente
which the West had pursued during the 1970s, and caused friction with allies
still wedded to the idea of détente.
US
forces were permitted by Mrs. Thatcher to station nuclear

cruise missiles at British bases, arousing mass protests by the

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. However, she later was the first Western
leader to respond warmly to the rise of reformist Soviet leader

Mikhail Gorbachev, declaring that she liked him and describing him as "a man
we can do business with" after a meeting in 1984, three months before he came to
power. This was a start of a move by the West back to a new détente with the
USSR under Gorbachev's leadership which coincided with the final erosion of
Soviet power prior to the turbulence of 1991 and the collapse of the Union.
Thatcher outlasted the Cold War, which ended in 1989, and voices who share her
views on it cr her with a part in the West's victory, by both the deterrence
and détente postures.

Also in 1985, as a deliberate snub, the

University of Oxford voted to refuse her an honorary degree in protest
against her cuts in funding for education.

[3] This award had always previously been given to Prime Ministers that had
been educated at Oxford.

She supported the

US bombing raid on Libya from bases in the UK in 1986 in defiance of other
NATO allies. Her
liking for defence ties with the United States was demonstrated in the

Westland affair when she acted with colleagues to allow the helicopter
manufacturer
Westland, a vital defence contractor, to refuse to link with the Italian
firm Agusta in
order for it to link with the managements preferred option,

Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation of the United States.

Defence Secretary

Michael Heseltine, who had pushed the Agusta deal, resigned in protest at
her style of leadership, and remained an influential critic and potential
leadership challenger. He would, eventually, prove instrumental in Thatcher's
fall in 1990.

In 1986 her government controversially abolished the

Greater London Council (GLC), then led by radical left-winger

Ken Livingstone, and six

Metropolitan County Councils (MCCs). The government claimed this was an
efficiency measure. However, Thatcher's opponents held that the move was
politically motivated, as all of the abolished councils were controlled by
Labour, had become powerful centres of opposition to her government, and were in
favour of higher public spending by local government.

Thatcher had two noted foreign policy successes in her second term.

• In 1984, she visited China and signed the
  
  Sino-British Joint Declaration with
  
  Deng Xiaoping on
  19
  December, which committed the
  
  People's Republic of China to award
  Hong Kong
  the status of a "Special Administrative Region". Under the terms of the
  so-called
  
  One Country, Two Systems agreement, China was obliged to leave Hong Kong's
  economic status unchanged after the handover on
  July 1,
  1997 for a period
  of fifty years – until 2047.


• At the Dublin European Council in November 1979, Mrs Thatcher argued that
  the United Kingdom paid far more to the
  
  European Economic Community than it received in spending. She famously
  declared at the summit: "We are not asking the Community or anyone else for
  money. We are simply asking to have our own money back". Her arguments were
  successful and at the June 1984 Fontainbleau Summit, the EEC agreed on an
  annual rebate for the United Kingdom, amounting to 66% of the difference
  between Britain's EU contributions and receipts. This still remains in effect
  and occasionally causes some political controversy among the members of the
  
  European Union.

1987–1990

By winning the

1987 general election, on the economic boom and against a Labour opposition
advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament, with a 102 majority, she became the
longest continuously serving

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since

Lord Liverpool (1812 to 1827), and the first to win three successive
elections since

Lord Palmerston in 1865. Most

United Kingdom newspapers supported her—with the exception of

The Daily Mirror,
The
Guardian and

The Independent—and were rewarded with regular press briefings by her
press secretary,

Bernard Ingham. She was known as "Maggie" in the
tabloids,
which inspired the well-known protest slogan "Maggie
Out!", chanted throughout that period by some of her opponents. Her
unpopularity on the left is evident from the lyrics of several contemporary
popular songs: "Stand Down Margaret" (The
Beat), "Tramp The Dirt Down" (Elvis
Costello), "Margaret On The Guillotine" (Morrissey)
and "Mother Knows Best" (Richard
Thompson).

Though an early backer of decriminalization of male homosexuality (see
above), Thatcher, at the 1987 Conservative party conference, issued the
statement that "Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral
values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay".
Backbench Conservative MPs and Peers had already begun a backlash against the
'promotion' of homosexuality and in December 1987 the controversial 'Section
28' was added as an amendment to what became the

Local Government Act 1988. This legislation has since been abolished.

Welfare reforms in her third term created an adult Employment Training system
that included full-time work done for the dole plus a £10 top-up, on the
workfare
model from the

US.

In the late 1980s, Thatcher, a former chemist, became concerned with
environmental issues, which she had previously dismissed^{[citation needed]}.
In 1988, she made

a major speech accepting the problems of

global warming,

ozone depletion and
acid rain.
In 1990, she opened the

Hadley Centre for climate prediction and research.

[4]. In her book Statecraft (2002), she described her later regret in
supporting the concept of human-induced global warming, outlining the negative
effects she perceived it had upon the policy-making process. "Whatever
international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must
enable our economies to grow and develop, because without growth you cannot
generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment"
(452).

At

Bruges, Belgium in 1988, Thatcher made a speech in which she outlined her
opposition to proposals from the

European Community for a federal structure and increasing centralisation of
decision-making. Although she had supported British membership, Thatcher
believed that the role of the EC should be limited to ensuring free trade and
effective competition, and feared that new EC regulations would reverse the
changes she was making in the UK. "We have not successfully rolled back the
frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European
level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels".
She was specifically against

Economic and Monetary Union, through which a single currency would replace
national currencies, and for which the EC was making preparations. The speech
caused an outcry from other European leaders, and exposed for the first time the
deep split that was emerging over European policy inside her Conservative Party.

Thatcher's popularity once again declined in 1989 as the economy suffered
from high interest rates imposed to stop an unsustainable
boom.
She blamed her Chancellor,
Nigel
Lawson, who had been following an economic policy which was a preparation
for monetary union; in an interview for the Financial Times in November
1987 Thatcher claimed not to have been told of this and did not approve.[5]

At a meeting before the
Madrid European
Community summit in June 1989, Lawson and Foreign Secretary

Geoffrey Howe forced Thatcher to agree the circumstances under which she
would join the

Exchange Rate Mechanism, a preparation for monetary union. At the meeting
they both claimed they would resign if there demands were not agreed to by
Thatcher.^[1]
Thatcher took revenge on both by demoting Howe and by listening more to her
adviser Sir
Alan
Walters on economic matters. Lawson resigned that October, feeling that
Thatcher had undermined him.^{[citation needed]}

That November, Thatcher was

challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by Sir

Anthony Meyer. As Meyer was a virtually unknown
backbench
MP, he was viewed as a

stalking horse candidate for more prominent members of the party. Thatcher
easily defeated Meyer's challenge, but there were sixty ballot papers either
cast for Meyer or abstaining, a surprisingly large number for a sitting Prime
Minister. Her supporters in the Party, however, viewed the results as a success,
claiming that after ten years as Prime Minister and with approximately 370
Conservative MPs voting, the opposition was surprisingly small.[6]

Thatcher's new system to replace local government rates, outlined in the
Conservative manifesto for the 1987 election, was introduced in
Scotland in
1989 and in
England and Wales
in 1990. The rates were replaced by the Community Charge (more widely known as
the "poll
tax"), which applied the same amount to every individual resident, with
discounts for low earners. This was to be the most universally unpopular policy
of her premiership.^{[citation needed]}

Additional problems emerged when many of the tax rates set by local councils
proved to be much higher than earlier predictions. Opponents of the Community
Charge banded together to resist
bailiffs and
disrupt court
hearings of Community Charge
debtors. The Labour
MP,
Terry Fields, was jailed for 60 days for refusing on principle to pay his
Community Charge. As Mrs Thatcher continued to refuse to compromise on the tax,
up to 18 million people refused to pay,^{[citation needed]}
enforcement measures became increasingly draconian, and unrest mounted and
culminated in a number of

riots. The most serious of these happened in London on
March 31,
1990, during a
protest at

Trafalgar Square,
London, which
more than 200,000 protesters attended. The huge unpopularity of the tax was a
major factor in Thatcher's downfall.

One of Thatcher's final acts in office was to pressure US President

George H. W. Bush to deploy troops to the
Middle
East to drive

Saddam Hussein's army out of
Kuwait. Bush
was somewhat apprehensive about the plan, but Thatcher famously told him that
this was "no time to go wobbly!"

On the Friday before the Conservative Party conference in October 1990,
Thatcher ordered her new

Chancellor of the Exchequer
John Major
to reduce interest rates by 1%. Major persuaded her that the only way to
maintain monetary stability was to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism at the same
time, despite not meeting the 'Madrid conditions'. The Conservative Party
conference that year saw a large degree of unity; few who attended could have
imagined that Mrs Thatcher had only a matter of weeks left in office.

Fall from power

By 1990, opposition to Thatcher's policies on local government taxation, her
Government's perceived mishandling of the economy (especially high

interest rates of 15%, which were undermining her core voting base within
the home-owning, entrepreneurial and business sectors), and the divisions
opening within her party over the appropriate handling of

European integration made her and her party seem increasingly politically
vulnerable.

A leadership challenge was precipitated by the

resignation of Sir

Geoffrey Howe, on
1 November
1990. Upon
returning to London, Thatcher consulted her cabinet colleagues. A large majority
believed that, the first round not being a clear win, she would lose the second
run-off ballot.

On 22
November, at just after 9.30 am, Mrs. Thatcher announced to her cabinet that
she would not be a candidate in the second ballot, thereby bringing her term of
office to an end.

"Having consulted widely among my colleagues, I have concluded that the
unity of the Party and the prospects of victory in a General Election would be
better served if I stood down to enable Cabinet colleagues to enter the ballot
for the leadership. I should like to thank all those in Cabinet and outside
who have given me such dedicated support."

In defeat, Margaret Thatcher seized the opportunity of the debate on
confidence in her government to deliver one of her most memorable performances:

"... a single currency is about the politics of Europe, it is about a
federal Europe by the back door. So I shall consider the proposal of the
Honourable Member for Bolsover (Mr.
Skinner). Now where were we? I am enjoying this."

She supported
John Major
as her successor and he duly won the leadership contest. After her resignation a
MORI poll found
that 52% agreed that "On balance she had been good for the country", with 44%
agreeing that she had been "bad".^[2]
In 1991, she was
given a long and unprecedented standing ovation at the party's annual
conference, although she politely rejected calls from delegates for her to make
a speech. She retired from the House of Commons at the

1992 election.

Achievements

Titles and honours

Titles from birth

Titles Lady Thatcher has held from birth, in chronological order:

• Miss Margaret Roberts (13
  October 1925
  – 13
  December 1951)


• Mrs Denis Thatcher (13
  December 1951
  – 8 October
  1959)


• Mrs Denis Thatcher, MP (8
  October 1959
  – 22 June
  1970)


• The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher, MP (22
  June 1970 –
  30 June
  1983)


• The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher, FRS, MP (30
  June 1983 –
  7
  December 1990)


• The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher, OM, FRS, MP (7
  December 1990
  – 4
  February 1991)


• The Right Honourable Lady Thatcher, OM, FRS, MP (4
  February 1991
  – 9 April
  1992)


• The Right Honourable Lady Thatcher, OM, FRS (9
  April 1992 –
  26 June
  1992)


• The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher, OM, PC, FRS (26
  June 1992 –
  22 April
  1995)


• The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS (22
  April 1995 –
  )

Honours

• 
  
  Lady of the Most Noble Order of the Garter


• 
  
  Member of the Order of Merit


• 
  
  Member of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council


• 
  
  Fellow of the Royal Society


• Honorary member of the
  
  gentlemen's club the
  
  Carlton Club, and the only female full member.

Foreign Honours

• 
  
  Presidential Medal of Freedom


• 
  
  Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom

Famous quotes