.
.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (née Roberts; born 13 October 1925) served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She is the only woman to have held either post.

Born in Grantham in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom, she went to school at Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School in Grantham, where she was head girl in 1942–43. She read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford and later trained as a barrister. She won a seat in the 1959 general election, becoming the MP for Finchley as a Conservative. When Edward Heath formed a government in 1970, he appointed Thatcher Secretary of State for Education and Science. Four years later, she backed Keith Joseph in his bid to become Conservative Party leader but he was forced to drop out of the election. In 1975 Thatcher entered the contest herself and became leader of the Conservative Party. At the 1979 general election she became Britain's first female Prime Minister.

In her foreword to the 1979 Conservative manifesto, Thatcher had written of "a feeling of helplessness, that a once great nation has somehow fallen behind." She entered 10 Downing Street determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitate national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and the selling off and closing down of state owned companies and withdrawing subsidy to others. Amid a recession and high unemployment, Thatcher's popularity declined, though economic recovery and the 1982 Falklands War brought a resurgence of support and she was re-elected in 1983. She took a hard line against trade unions, survived the Brighton hotel bombing assassination attempt and opposed the Soviet Union (her tough-talking rhetoric gained her the nickname the "Iron Lady"); she was re-elected for an unprecedented third term in 1987. The following years would prove difficult, as her Poll tax plan was largely unpopular, and her views regarding the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister in November 1990 after Michael Heseltine's challenge to her leadership of the Conservative Party.

Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister was the longest since that of Lord Salisbury and the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century. She was the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom, and the first of only four women to hold any of the four great offices of state. She holds a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, which entitles her to sit in the House of Lords.

Later years

Mrs Thatcher retained her parliamentary seat in the House of Commons as MP for Finchley for two years, returning to the backbenches after leaving the premiership. She supported John Major as her successor and he duly won the leadership contest, although in the years to come her approval of Major would fall away. She occasionally spoke in the House of Commons after she was Prime Minister, commenting and campaigning on issues regarding her beliefs and concerns. In 1991, she was given an unprecedented five minute standing ovation at the party's annual conference. She retired from the House at the 1992 election, at the age of 66 years; she said that leaving the Commons would allow her more freedom to speak her mind.

Post-Commons

After leaving the House of Commons, Thatcher remained active in politics. She wrote two volumes of memoirs: The Downing Street Years, published in 1993 and The Path to Power published in 1995.

In August 1992 Thatcher called for NATO to stop the Serbian assault on Goražde and Sarajevo in order to end ethnic cleansing and to preserve the Bosnian state. She described the situation in Bosnia as "reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Nazis", warning that there could be a "holocaust" in Bosnia and described the conflict as a "killing field the like of which I thought we would never see in Europe again." She made a series of speeches in the Lords criticising the Maastricht Treaty, describing it as "a treaty too far" and stated "I could never have signed this treaty". She cited A. V. Dicey, to the effect that, since all three main parties were in favour of revisiting the treaty, the people should have their say.

From 1993 to 2000, Lady Thatcher served as Chancellor of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, which, established by Royal Charter in 1693, is the sole royal foundation in the contiguous United States. She was also Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, the UK's only private university.

After Tony Blair's election as Labour Party leader in 1994, Thatcher gave an interview in May 1995 in which she praised Blair as "probably the most formidable Labour leader since Hugh Gaitskell. I see a lot of socialism behind their front bench, but not in Mr Blair. I think he genuinely has moved."

Lady Thatcher visited former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, once a key British ally during the 1982 Falklands War, while he was under house arrest in Surrey in 1998. Pinochet was fighting extradition to Spain for alleged human rights abuses committed during his tenure. Thatcher expressed her support and friendship for Pinochet, who had swept to power on a wave of military violence and torture in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, thanking him for supporting Britain in the Falklands War and for "bringing democracy to Chile."

In 1999, during Thatcher's first speech to a Conservative Party conference in nine years, she contended that Britain's problems came from continental Europe. Her comments aroused some criticism from Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Foreign Secretary under Sir John Major, who said that Lady Thatcher's comments could give the impression that Britain is prejudiced against Europe.

In the 2001 general election, Lady Thatcher supported the Conservative general election campaign but this time did not endorse Iain Duncan Smith in public as she had done previously for John Major and William Hague. In the Conservative leadership election shortly after, she supported Iain Duncan Smith because she believed he would "make infinitely the better leader" than Kenneth Clarke.

In March 2002 Thatcher published her final book, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, detailing her thoughts on mainly international relations and dedicated to Ronald Reagan. She claimed there would no peace in the Middle East until Saddam Hussein was toppled and said if he was found to be involved in the 11 September 2001 attacks, war was right. She also said Israel must trade land for peace as part of an equitable settlement. The most controversial part, however, dealt with the European Union. It was "fundamentally unreformable" and "a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure". She argued that Britain should renegotiate its terms of membership but if this failed Britain should leave the EU and join the North American Free Trade Area. This book was serialised in The Times on Monday 18 March and caused a sensation. Having dominated the media all week with her views on the EU, on Friday 23 March she announced that on the advice of her doctors she would cancel all planned speaking engagements and accept no more.

In July 2002, theatre producer Paul Kelleher, 37, decapitated a £150,000, 8 ft (2.4 m) marble sculpture of Thatcher. Using a cricket bat hidden in his trousers, Kelleher took a swipe at the statue on display at the Guildhall Art Gallery, central London. When he failed to knock off the head, he grabbed a metal pole to complete the act. He was jailed.

Activities since 2003

Thatcher was widowed upon the death of Sir Denis Thatcher on 26 June 2003. A funeral service was held honouring him at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea on 3 July with Thatcher present, as well as her children Mark and Carol. Thatcher paid tribute to him by saying, "Being Prime Minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be—you cannot lead from a crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone. What a man. What a husband. What a friend".

At a secret meeting of the No Turning Back group of Conservative MPs, she spoke against the Labour government's plans for compulsory identity cards, saying: "Identity cards are a Germanic concept and completely alien to this country. I don't see why we should have them". She claimed they would not protect Britain from a terrorist attack nor reduce crime.

Now in her declining years, she began complaining about her "lost" family (Mark in South Africa, Carol in Switzerland), but her daughter was less than sympathetic: "A mother cannot reasonably expect her grown-up children to boomerang back, gushing cosiness and make up for lost time. Absentee Mum, then Gran in overdrive is not an equation that balances."

The following year, on 11 June, Thatcher travelled to the United States to attend the state funeral service for former US President Ronald Reagan, one of her closest friends, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Thatcher delivered a eulogy via videotape to Reagan; in view of her failing mental faculties following several small strokes, the message had been pre-recorded several months earlier. Thatcher then flew to California with the Reagan entourage, and attended the memorial service and interment ceremony for President Reagan at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Thatcher marked her 80th birthday with a celebration at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hyde Park, London on 13 October 2005, where the guests included the Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Alexandra and Tony Blair. There, Geoffrey Howe, now Lord Howe of Aberavon, said of his former boss, "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."

In 2006, Thatcher attended the official Washington, D.C. memorial service to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. She attended as a guest of the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, and met with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit. On 12 November, she appeared at the Remembrance Day parade at the Cenotaph in London, leaning heavily on the arm of Sir John Major. On 10 December she announced she was "deeply saddened" by the death of Augusto Pinochet.

In February 2007, she became the first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to be honoured with a statue in the Houses of Parliament while still living. The statue is made of bronze and stands opposite her political hero and predecessor, Sir Winston Churchill. The statue was unveiled on 21 February 2007 with Lady Thatcher in attendance; she made a rare and brief speech in the members' lobby of the House of Commons, reposting, "I might have preferred iron — but bronze will do... It won't rust." The statue shows her as if she were addressing the House of Commons, with her right arm outstretched. Thatcher said she was thrilled with it.

On 13 September 2007, Thatcher was invited to 10 Downing Street to have tea with Gordon Brown and his wife. Brown referred to Lady Thatcher as a "conviction politician." On 30 January 2008, Thatcher met David Cameron at an awards ceremony at London's Guildhall where she was presented with a 'Lifetime Achievement Award'. In May 2009, she travelled to Rome to meet Pope Benedict XVI in a private audience at the Vatican. She had previously met Paul VI in 1977 and John Paul II in 1980. On the 8th of June 2010 she again returned to Downing Street to have tea with the Prime Minister, David Cameron and his wife Samantha Cameron, where she said it was 'good to be back in Downing Street'.

Lady Thatcher was invited back to Number 10 in late November 2009 to be at the unveiling of an official portrait by the artist, Richard Stone, who had previously painted The Queen and the late Queen Mother. Lady Thatcher was invited along with guests including David Cameron, as well as former members of Lady Thatcher's Cabinet and members of the Conservative-supporting newspapers throughout the 1980s including the Chief Political Commentator of The Telegraph, Benedict Brogan, and former Sun editor, Kelvin MacKenzie.

It is a rare honour for a living Prime Minister to have a commissioned painted portrait hanging in the Prime Minister's residence: all other living prime ministers having photographs only that line the stair walls of Number 10. Baroness Thatcher and only two other Prime Ministers have their portraits painted as well as a hung photograph on display. Sir Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George are the only other Prime Ministers to have hung painted portraits on display in Number 10 Downing Street.

Health

Thatcher suffered several small strokes in 2002 and she was advised by her doctors not to engage in any more public speaking. As a result of the strokes, her short term memory began to falter. Her former press spokesman Sir Bernard Ingham said in early 2007, "She's now got no short-term memory left, which is absolutely tragic."

Thatcher was admitted to St Thomas' Hospital, Central London on 7 March 2008, for tests after collapsing at a House of Lords dinner. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where she spent one night. The incident was probably caused by her low blood pressure and stuffy conditions within the dining hall.

On 24 August 2008 it was publicly disclosed that Thatcher has been suffering from dementia. Her daughter Carol described in her 2008 memoir, A Swim-on Part in the Goldfish Bowl, first observing in 2000 that Thatcher was becoming forgetful. The condition later became more noticeable; at times, Thatcher thought that her husband Denis, who died in 2003, was still living. Carol Thatcher recalls that her mother's memories of the time she spent as Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990 remain among her sharpest.

In June 2009 Thatcher broke a bone in her arm in a fall at home. She underwent a 45-minute surgical procedure to insert a pin into her upper arm. She spent a total of three weeks in hospital before being discharged.

On 13 November 2009, rumours of Thatcher's death were erroneously circulated within the Canadian Government whilst they attended a black-tie dinner, after transport minister John Baird sent a text message announcing the death of his pet tabby called Thatcher. The news was reported to Prime Minister Stephen Harper as the death of Baroness Thatcher, and almost caused a diplomatic incident between Canada and the United Kingdom, but the Canadian Government rang Downing Street and Buckingham Palace to seek verification.

Legacy

Thatcher remains identified with her remarks to the reporter Douglas Keay, for Woman's Own magazine, 23 September 1987:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations...

As the individualistic credo expressed above took hold of Thatcher's Britain, egalitarian concerns dwindled. "Authorities on poverty rates and income distributions differ as to precisely when the optimum moment of equality in Britain came, but some statistics leap out. The Gini coefficient, a common measure of income inequality, reached its lowest level for British households in 1977. The proportion of individual Britons below the poverty line did the same in 1978. Social mobility, the likelihood of someone becoming part of a different class from their parents, peaked in the Callaghan era. The egalitarian Britain of the Callaghan years and its social trends were relentlessly reversed in the Thatcher years and beyond, so that Britain in the 1970s was probably more equal than it had ever been before, and certainly more than it has ever been since."

To her supporters Margaret Thatcher remains a figure who revitalised Britain's economy, impacted the trade unions, and re-established the nation as a world power. Yet Thatcher was also a controversial figure, her premiership marked by high unemployment and social unrest, and many critics fault her economic policies for the unemployment level. Speaking in Scotland in April 2009, before the 30th anniversary of her election as prime minister, Thatcher declared: "I regret nothing", and insisted she "was right to introduce the poll tax and to close loss-making industries to end the country's 'dependency culture'."

Critics have regretted her influence in the abandonment of full employment, poverty reduction and a consensual civility as bedrock policy objectives. Many recent biographers have been critical of many aspects of the Thatcher years and Michael White writing in New Statesman in February 2009 wondered if the ' hubristic collapse of the free-market model of capitalism that she promoted [had] dealt her another blow. Who was it who first removed the seat belts and airbags from the safe-but-boring Volvo that the West built after 1945? 'Her freer, more promiscuous version of capitalism' in Hugo Young's phrase is reaping a darker harvest."

The Labour party on gaining power in 1997, did not reverse Thatcher's privatising state-owned enterprises.

Thatcher's growth model was to promote privatisation of public assets and deregulation of the private sector, particularly the financial sector, its encouragement of the financial sector to 'create new ways of spreading risk and expanding credit'. The financial revolution in London in the 1980s meant that among the large economies none rivalled Britain for the relative size of its financial sector.

In his 2009 TV series 'Off Kilter', looking at Scotland, the cultural commentator Jonathan Meades spoke of Thatcher's legacy in Fife: "Fife's mining towns and villages were victims, collateral as they say, of that bloody spat of 25 years ago;—mining might, just might, have been economically exhausted, but it was socially cohesive; it's undeniable that jobs do foment pride, they inculcate an idea of self worth. Finchley was quite incapable of empathy. There is much to be said in favour of inefficient industry, not least that that the human cost of efficiency and adherence to the bottom line does not have to be paid, - nor for that matter does unemployment benefit have to be paid to the tens of thousands rationalised into involuntary idleness. Further, the Finchley faith, which became the enthusiastically adopted cross-party consensus of the past 25 years, the faith that manufacturing industry was an irrelevance, and that an entire economy, a soufflé economy, might be founded on the no-holds-barred selflessness of deregulated debt rights, peddling expensive money, proved to be just that, a faith, an expression of unfounded wishfulness."

In April 2008, the Daily Telegraph commissioned a YouGov poll asking whom Britons regarded as the greatest post-World War II prime minister; Thatcher came in first, receiving 34% of the vote, while Winston Churchill ranked second with 15%.