Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was an English stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. Born Margaret Roberts in Grantham, Lincolnshire, on 13 October 1925, she became the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold the office. A Soviet journalist called her the “Iron Lady,” a nickname that stayed with her because of her uncompromising politics and leadership style.

Her early life was rooted in work, faith, study, and local politics. Her father, Alfred Roberts, owned a tobacconist’s and grocery shop, served as an alderman, was a Methodist local preacher, and later became Mayor of Grantham. Thatcher was brought up as a strict Wesleyan Methodist, though as a young scientist she could be sceptical, once telling a friend she could not believe in angels after calculating the size of breastbone needed to support wings. During the Second World War she worked voluntarily as a fire watcher, and in 1938 her family briefly gave sanctuary to a teenage Jewish girl who had escaped Nazi Germany.

Thatcher attended Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, where her reports showed hard work and steady improvement, and she was head girl in 1942–43. She won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, to study chemistry, entering in 1943. There she studied under Dorothy Hodgkin, whom she later described as “ever-helpful,” “a brilliant scientist and a gifted teacher.” Thatcher graduated in 1947 with a second-class honours degree in chemistry, worked briefly as a research chemist, and later became a barrister. She was reportedly prouder of becoming the first prime minister with a science degree than of becoming the first female prime minister.

Her parliamentary career began when she was elected Member of Parliament for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science in his 1970–1974 government. In 1975 she defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election, becoming Leader of the Opposition and the first woman to lead a major British political party. After winning the 1979 general election, she became prime minister and introduced economic policies intended to reverse high inflation and Britain’s struggles after the Winter of Discontent and an oncoming recession.

As prime minister, Thatcher gave her name to Thatcherism. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised greater individual liberty, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Her first years in office brought falling popularity amid recession and rising unemployment, but victory in the 1982 Falklands War and a recovering economy helped return the Conservatives to government by a landslide in 1983. She survived the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing by the Provisional IRA, won a political victory against the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984–85 miners’ strike, and in 1986 oversaw the deregulation of UK financial markets, known as the Big Bang.

Thatcher won a third term in 1987, but her support for the Community Charge, also known as the poll tax, was widely unpopular, and her increasingly Eurosceptic views on the European Community were not shared by others in her cabinet. She resigned in 1990 after a leadership challenge and was succeeded by John Major. After leaving the House of Commons in 1992, she received a life peerage and sat in the House of Lords. She died of a stroke at the Ritz Hotel, London, on 8 April 2013, aged 87. A polarising figure, she remains a subject of debate, which is one reason her public words still carry force: they came from a leader who changed the direction of British politics and made conviction central to her public image.