Obituary: Margaret Thatcher
BBC
Margaret
Thatcher, who has died following a stroke, was one of the most influential
political figures of the 20th Century.
Her legacy had a
profound effect upon the policies of her successors, both Conservative and
Labour, while her radical and sometimes confrontational approach defined her
11-year period at No 10.
Her term in
office saw thousands of ordinary voters gaining a stake in society, buying
their council houses and eagerly snapping up shares in the newly privatised
industries such as British Gas and BT.
But her
rejection of consensus politics made her a divisive figure and opposition to
her policies and her style of government led eventually to rebellion inside her
party and unrest on the streets.
Father's influence
Margaret Hilda
Thatcher was born on 13 October 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the daughter of
Alfred Roberts, a grocer, and his wife, Beatrice.
Her father, a
Methodist lay preacher and local councillor, had an immense influence on her
life and the policies she would adopt.
"Well, of
course, I just owe almost everything to my own father. I really do," she
said later. "He brought me up to believe all the things that I do
believe."
She studied chemistry
at Somerville College, Oxford, and became only the third female president of
the Oxford University Conservative Association.
After graduating
she moved to Colchester where she worked for a plastics company and became
involved with the local Conservative Party organisation.
In 1949, she was
adopted as the prospective Conservative candidate for the seat of Dartford in
Kent which she fought, unsuccessfully, in the 1950 and 1951 general elections.
However, she
made a significant dent in the Labour majority and, as the then youngest ever
Conservative candidate, attracted a lot of media attention.
In 1951 she
married a divorced businessman, Denis Thatcher, and began studying for the Bar
exams. She qualified as a barrister in 1953, the year in which her twins Mark
and Carol were born.
She tried,
unsuccessfully, to gain selection as a candidate in 1955, but finally entered
Parliament for the safe Conservative seat of Finchley at the 1959 general
election.
Within two years
she had been appointed as a junior minister and, following the Conservative
defeat in 1964, was promoted to the shadow cabinet.
'Milk snatcher'
When Sir Alec
Douglas-Home stood down as Conservative leader, Mrs Thatcher voted for Ted
Heath in the 1965 leadership election and was rewarded with a post as
spokeswoman on housing and land.
She campaigned
vigorously for the right of council tenants to buy their houses and was a
constant critic of Labour's policy of high taxation.
When Ted Heath
entered Downing Street in 1970, she was promoted to the cabinet as education
secretary with a brief to implement spending cuts in her department.
One of these
resulted in the withdrawal of free school milk for children aged between seven
and 11 which led to bitter attacks from Labour and a press campaign which
dubbed her "Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher".
She herself had
argued in cabinet against the removal of free milk. She later wrote: "I
learned a valuable lesson. I had incurred the maximum of political odium for
the minimum of political benefit."
As one of the
few high-flying women in politics there was, inevitably, talk of the
possibility that she might, one day, become prime minister. Similar press
speculation surrounded the Labour minister Shirley Williams.
Margaret Thatcher
dismissed the idea. In a TV interview she said she did not believe that there
would be a woman prime minister in her lifetime.
The Heath
government was not to last. Battered by the 1973 oil crisis, forced to impose a
three-day working week and facing a miners' strike, Edward Heath's
administration finally collapsed in February 1974.
Housewife-politician
Thatcher became
shadow environment secretary but, angered by what she saw as Heath's U-turns on
Conservative economic policy, stood against him for the Tory leadership in
1975.
When she went
into Heath's office to tell him her decision, he did not even bother to look
up. "You'll lose," he said. "Good day to you."
To everyone's
surprise, she defeated Heath on the first ballot, forcing his resignation, and
she saw off Willie Whitelaw on the second ballot to become the first woman to
lead a major British political party.
She quickly
began to make her mark. A 1976 speech criticising the repressive policies of
the Soviet Union led to a Russian newspaper dubbing her "the Iron
Lady," a title which gave her much personal pleasure.
Adopting the
persona of a housewife-politician who knew what inflation meant to ordinary
families, she challenged the power of the trades unions whose almost constant
industrial action peaked in the so-called "winter of discontent" in
1979.
As the Callaghan
government tottered, the Conservatives rolled out a poster campaign showing a
queue of supposedly unemployed people under the slogan "Labour Isn't
Working".
Jim Callaghan
lost a vote of confidence on 28 March 1979. Mrs Thatcher's no-nonsense views
struck a chord with many voters and the Conservatives won the ensuing general
election.
Monetary policies
As prime
minister, she was determined to repair the country's finances by reducing the
role of the state and boosting the free market.
Cutting
inflation was central to the government's purpose and it soon introduced a
radical budget of tax and spending cuts.
Bills were
introduced to curb union militancy, privatise state industries and allow
council home owners to buy their houses.
Millions of
people who previously had little or no stake in the economy found themselves
being able to own their houses and buy shares in the former state-owned
businesses.
New monetary
policies made the City of London one of the most vibrant and successful
financial centres in the world.
Old-style
manufacturing, which critics complained was creating an industrial wasteland,
was run down in the quest for a competitive new Britain. Unemployment rose
above three million.
There was
considerable unrest among the so called "wets" on the Conservative
back benches and that, coupled with riots in some inner city areas, saw
pressure on Margaret Thatcher to modify her policies.
But the prime
minister refused to crumble. She told the 1980 party conference: "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."
Falklands War
By late 1981 her
approval rating had fallen to 25%, the lowest recorded for any prime minister
until that time, but the economic corner had been turned.
In early 1982
the economy began to recover and, with it, the prime minister's standing among
the electorate.
Her popularity
received its biggest boost in April 1982 with her decisive response to the
Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands.
The prime
minister immediately despatched a naval task force and the islands were retaken
on 14 June when the Argentine forces surrendered.
Victory in the
Falklands, together with disarray in the Labour Party, now led by Michael Foot,
ensured a Conservative landslide in the 1983 election.
The following
spring the National Union of Mineworkers called a nationwide strike, despite
the failure of their firebrand president, Arthur Scargill, to ballot his
members.
Margaret
Thatcher was determined not to falter. Unlike the situation Edward Heath faced
in 1973, the government had built up substantial stocks of coal at power
stations in advance of the industrial action.
Third term
There were
brutal clashes between pickets and police but the strike eventually collapsed
the following March. Many mining communities never recovered from the dispute
that hastened the decline of the coal industry.
In Northern
Ireland, Mrs Thatcher faced down IRA hunger strikers, though her hard-line
approach infuriated even moderate nationalist opinion and critics claimed it
drove many young Catholics towards the path of violence.
Although she
attempted to ease sectarian tensions, offering Dublin a role, peace efforts
collapsed beneath the weight of Unionist opposition.
In October 1984,
an IRA bomb exploded in the Conservative conference hotel in Brighton. Five
people died and many others, including cabinet minister Norman Tebbit, were
seriously injured.
Characteristically,
the prime minister insisted on delivering a typically robust response in her
keynote conference speech a few hours later.
"This attack
has failed. All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail."
Her foreign
policy was aimed at building up the profile of the UK abroad, something she
believed had been allowed to decline under previous Labour administrations.
She found a soulmate
in the US president, Ronald Reagan, who shared many of her economic views, and
she struck up an unlikely alliance with Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming Soviet
president. "We can do business together," she famously said.
Labour, now led
by Neil Kinnock, had still not recovered from years of in-fighting and Mrs
Thatcher won an unprecedented third term at the 1987 general election.
One of her first
actions was to introduce the poll tax or community charge, a flat-rate tax for
local services which was based on individuals rather than the value of the
property in which they lived.
'Treachery with a smile'
It sparked some
of the worst street violence in living memory. Tory MPs, alarmed that the tax
could cost them their seats, saw no way of getting rid of it so long as
Margaret Thatcher was in charge.
She easily
survived a leadership challenge from an unknown back-bencher in 1989 but the
challenge was just a symptom of increasing dissatisfaction among Conservative
MPs over her policies.
It was the issue
of Europe which, eventually, brought about her downfall.
Returning from a
fractious Euro summit in Rome, she let rip against her European counterparts,
refusing to countenance any increase in the power of the European Community and
outraging many colleagues.
"The
President of the Commission, Monsieur Delors, said at a press conference the
other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of
the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the
Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No. No. No."
Sir Geoffrey
Howe, resentful since being ousted as foreign secretary, seized his moment to
quit the cabinet, deliver a devastating resignation speech and invite
challengers for the leadership.
The following
day, Michael Heseltine threw his hat into the ring. Falling two votes short of
preventing the contest going to a second round, Margaret Thatcher declared she
would fight on.
Told by close
colleagues, the famous "men in grey suits," that she would lose, she
used her next cabinet meeting to announce her resignation. Later, she mused
bitterly: "It was treachery with a smile on its face."
John Major was
elected her successor and Margaret Thatcher returned to the back benches,
finally standing down as an MP in 1992 when the Conservatives, against all
predictions, were again returned to power.
Later years
She was elevated
to the peerage as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire,
receiving the Order of the Garter in 1995.
She wrote two
volumes of her memoirs while remaining active in politics, campaigning against
the Maastricht Treaty and condemning the Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing in
Bosnia.
She publicly
endorsed William Hague for the Conservative leadership in 1997 but pointedly
failed to speak in favour of his successor, Iain Duncan Smith.
She was forced
to curtail her activities in 2001 when her health began to deteriorate. After a
series of minor strokes, her doctors advised her against making public speaking
appearances and she appeared increasingly frail.
She was also
suffering from dementia which was affecting her short-term memory, something
her daughter, Carol, would reveal in 2008.
When her husband
Denis - whom she had described as her "rock" - died in 2003 aged 88,
she paid him an emotional tribute.
"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."
A year later she
travelled to the US to bid farewell to her political partner Ronald Reagan,
whose funeral took place in Washington in June 2004.
She continued to
appear in public, perhaps most notably when she unveiled a bronze statue of
herself in the House of Commons, the first time a living former prime minister
had been commemorated in this way.
And she returned
to Downing Street. Gordon Brown invited her for tea, shortly after he became
prime minister and she was back in 2010 as a guest of David Cameron, the new
head of a coalition government.
Legacy
Few politicians
have exercised such dominance during their term in office and few politicians
have attracted such strength of feeling, both for and against.
To her
detractors she was the politician who put the free market above all else and
who was willing to allow others to pay the price for her policies in terms of
rising unemployment and social unrest.
Her supporters
hail her for rolling back the frontiers of an overburdening state, reducing the
influence of powerful trades union leaders and restoring Britain's standing in
the world.
She was, above
all, that rare thing, a conviction politician who was prepared to stand by
those convictions for good or ill.
Her firm belief
that deeply held convictions should never be compromised by consensus was her
great strength and, at the same time, her greatest weakness.
For many, her
philosophy was summed up in a magazine interview she gave in 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."
KEY MOMENTS
- Born Margaret Roberts on 13 October 1925
- First stood for Parliament in the 1950 election
- Married businessman Denis Thatcher in 1951
- Elected as Conservative MP for Finchley in 1959
- Named education secretary by Ted Heath in 1970
- Defeated Heath in Tory leadership contest in 1975
- Became first female prime minister after Conservative election victory in 1979
- Sends taskforce to regain control of the Falklands Islands in 1982
- Wins landslide election victory in 1983
- Fights year-long battle with mining unions in 1984-5
- Survives IRA bombing of Brighton hotel during 1984 Conservative conference
- Wins third general election victory in 1987
- Resigns after facing leadership challenge in 1990
- Stands down as MP in 1992 and awarded a peerage