She stood in front of the mirror, adjusting her pale hair and smoothing the red chiffon of her evening gown. She was the Iron Lady now, and she knew it. But long before that, Margaret Thatcher was just a girl in a small Lincolnshire town, watching her father run a shop and serve on the local council. She learned her values at his knee.
He believed a man’s duty was to put a roof over his family’s head and food on the table. She never mentioned her mother. Her father was her hero. He taught her to lead, and she never forgot it.
At school, she was the one who stood up at the end of visiting speakers’ talks to ask penetrating questions. Her classmates would exchange looks and murmur, “Oh, she’s at it again. ” No one thought she was extraordinary then. A chemistry tutor at Oxford later called her a perfectly good second-class chemist.
But she became the first woman president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, and everyone noticed how she ran its affairs with clarity and strength. She decided she wanted politics. She worked as a food scientist, dabbled with the idea of law, but politics was her calling. She was a conviction politician from the start.
She wanted to make a difference. The older Conservative men thought they could handle her, this attractive young woman with a loud voice and a grating tone. But Margaret Thatcher had convictions and drive, and she was determined to find a seat. She met Dennis Thatcher the night she was adopted as a candidate for Dartford.
He gave her a lift home after a meeting, and he changed her life. He was slightly older, well off, with his own company. He gave her the freedom to pursue her ambitions without worrying about money. She always said Dennis was her rock, and she meant it.
When there was tension in the air, he could take it out instantly. She was elected to Parliament, made a junior minister within two years. The whips had spotted her talent. She combined her political life with running a home and raising twins.
She said she did the shopping and cooked big batches on weekends, and she saw the children every morning. People asked her how she managed. She said she just got on with it. She never understood why anyone would ask the question.
Plenty of women got on with it. The public perception of her shifted over time. At first, they called her Maggie, treated her lightly, made jokes about the woman Prime Minister. But she changed.
She became the toughest person in her own cabinet. President Mitterrand of France once said she had the eyes of Caligula but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe. She had charm and good looks, and she wasn’t afraid to use them. She could flutter her eyelids and smile sweetly when she needed the men to notice she was an attractive woman.
But she was never frightened. She had a quality of fearlessness that she sustained throughout her life. In the early seventies, Ted Heath’s government was a disaster. He tried to show the miners who was boss and ended up with the three-day week, lights going out across the country.
The right wing of the Tory party began to look for someone who was as far from Heath as possible. She started to become a magnet for them. She worked her way through shadow portfolios, building expertise. And when she finally decided the party was going in the wrong direction and she saw no one else who could correct it, she decided to go for it.
That was the point where she stopped being an ordinary person and became an extraordinary one. She won the leadership. People were relieved they had gotten rid of Heath, but there was also a feeling of “What have we done? ” She had a strange voice, not upper-class.
She talked to everyone as if they were children. Some politicians were furious at being ordered around by this woman. Others were great supporters, aware of her capacity. She sought every opportunity to get out and meet people.
Press called her Maggie. Then the Russians gave her a better name. An army newspaper in Moscow called her the Iron Lady of the Western world. She loved it.
She stood up at a dinner wearing her red chiffon gown and leaned into the label. She said they could call her what they liked if they believed Britain should ignore the build-up of Russian military strength. When she became Prime Minister, Britain was in a difficult period. There had been strikes everywhere, a feeling the country was in decline.
After her victory, she quoted St. Francis of Assisi about bringing harmony where there was discord. She had the words written on a card in her hand, determined to get it right. Her first government was not as radical as people now think.
It was quite moderate, quite consensual. She had plenty of people called wets in her cabinet. But as the years went by, she became more strident as she grew in confidence. She never believed in consensus politics.
She thought that was where Ted Heath had gone wrong. A leader had to lead, to convince people and bring them round. One colleague said she had great stamina, dedication, and courage, but she suffered from an incapacity for thinking she might be wrong. People in Whitehall knew exactly where she stood.
After meetings, they would ask each other, “How will this play at Number 10? Will we get this past the Prime Minister? ”
She was also careful with the Queen. Her chauffeur said that when she had an audience at Windsor, they would leave so early they had to park in a lay-by for up to an hour to arrive on time.
She was that anxious about getting it right. The Queen was comfortable with her, but Margaret was very conscious that this was the Queen. When she left office, the Queen gave her the Order of Merit and later the Order of the Garter, honors in the personal gift of the Queen. That told you everything about what the Queen thought of her.
The Falklands War showed her approach. When Argentina invaded, she was not going to have it. Whatever the rights and wrongs, she would not allow a foreign country to invade a part of Britain with impunity. She cut through red tape to get troops out as fast as possible.
They fitted air-to-air refueling mechanisms on tankers so planes could reach the Falklands and return, and they fitted out the QE2 as a support ship. People still say nothing like it has been achieved since. When it was over, she stood before the crowd and said, “Mr. President, it was never really lost,” when someone claimed British patriotism had been rediscovered in those spring days.
The biggest clash of her premiership came with the miners. The coal industry was in decline, but the mine workers were militant, led by Arthur Scargill. He called a strike to stop pit closures. It was an epic battle between her vision of Britain and his view that working people in traditional industries needed protecting.
She quietly prepared. The National Coal Board built up coal stocks. Officially, it was all down to them, but everyone knew it wasn’t like that. She wanted this sorted out once and for all.
During the strike, a man was killed when striking miners threw concrete off a bridge. She was in Paris that day. A reporter caught her on the steps of the Elysee Palace and asked if it was time to open negotiations. Her eyes blazed at him.
She swept around and said, “Mr. Bronson, you never give in to violence. ” She turned on her heel and walked away. She would never negotiate with people who used coercion and violence to achieve their objectives.
She called them the enemies of democracy. In the end, she won. There is almost no coal industry left. Scargill is long retired.
The power of the mining unions is gone. At the party conference in Brighton, a bomb went off during the night. It destroyed rooms on three floors of the hotel. She was awake, finishing her conference speech, when the explosion happened.
Her bathroom was badly damaged, but she was in the kitchen. She went to the police station to tell newsmen about her escape. She said you hear about these atrocities, but you don’t expect them to happen to you. Life must go on as usual.
The conference would go on. She had a good relationship with Ronald Reagan. When Russian and American leaders met, they always seemed to come by Britain, and she was always there. She was the right woman in the right place at the right time.
Together with Reagan, she became associated with the end of communism, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. They were friends, kindred spirits. She had a deep distrust of the Germans, a historical thing from the war. She didn’t get on with the French either.
She was determined to keep the British currency. After she won again in 1987, things began to change. She became more authoritarian. Nothing happened unless she did it and forced it through.
One colleague said that what makes politicians successful at the beginning is what brings them down later. Her success came from not listening to her ministers and driving things ahead. Eventually, that did for her. The disagreement over Europe with her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, became serious.
Lawson wanted to move toward monetary union and was trying to get the pound to shadow the Deutschmark. She thought it was suspicious. She appointed Alan Walters as her economic advisor, and he told her daily that Lawson was wrong. Lawson resigned.
She said his position was unassailable, and she tried to persuade him to stay. She couldn’t believe he would go. But he did. There were signs of a recession coming.
There were arguments over Europe. And then there was the poll tax. She insisted on calling it the community charge, but everyone else called it the poll tax. Enough people told her the country would not accept it.
It was widely seen as an unfair tax, and for many people, it meant their payments went up. They blamed her. She became completely intransigent. She ignored people’s advice and went ahead with it anyway.
It was her biggest mistake. A riot broke out over it. She expressed her horror, saying nothing warranted this. The place to discuss these matters was Parliament.
These people were totally against democracy. Geoffrey Howe delivered the coup de grace. He had been a mild man, but he came to disagree with her violently over Europe. He had been replaced as Chancellor, and then he stood up in the House of Commons and made a speech attacking her leadership.
He said the Prime Minister’s attitude towards Europe was running serious risks for the future of the nation. He said it was like sending your opening batsman to the crease only for them to find their bats had been broken before the game by the team captain. There were enough backbenchers who felt the poll tax had alienated them. They had begun to talk about challenging her leadership.
A leadership election was held. She was not well satisfied with the result. She said she was pleased to have the overwhelming support of her colleagues, but she knew. Dennis Thatcher was on his feet, firmly on the ground, a good advisor.
He told her it was time to go. The game was up. And she stepped aside. She left Downing Street for the last time after eleven and a half years.
She said they were leaving the United Kingdom in a much better state than when they had come. The decision was difficult, it was heartbreaking, but it was the right one. Later, she said she couldn’t understand how she could have lost when she had never lost an election and never lost a major vote in the House of Commons. She thought that after eleven and a half years, she should have had more authority and backing from her own party.
But they said to her, “You haven’t been to ask us to vote for you. Other people have. ” She thought, “Goodness me, do I after eleven and a half years have to go and ask personally for a vote? ”
Years after she left office, in an interview, she was asked to recall the events of those final ten days.
She burst into tears in the middle of the interview. The interviewer and crew had to stop and let her go and fix her makeup. She said she had managed to get through the television, she had managed to get through the cabinet. She just got on with it.
She promised John Major her support. But she said, in paraphrase, “John Major’s the driver, but don’t forget I’m a very good backseat driver. ” That did a lot of harm. She had very strong views on Europe and was disappointed in him.
The party elders were told not to rock the boat, but Lady Thatcher still spoke out. At the party conference, she held center stage, cheered as no other former leader was cheered. She was conscious of her place in history, but she wasn’t personally vainglorious. She was aware that she had achieved something remarkable.
Long after she left office, a reporter went to interview her at her new office near Parliament. It was as if she was still in power. There were police guards on the door, people scurrying about. Her office was big, with a large desk and pictures on the wall.
Almost all of them were about the Falklands War. Some people see the Thatcher years as the best since the Second World War, a time when Britain’s influence in the world came back. Others, people of more humble origins, regret those years, believing she did damage to the country. It depends entirely on how well you did during that period.
Her impact was enormous. She changed the way political business was done. The idea of a warm, cozy consensus was gone forever. She stood before them in her red chiffon gown, the Iron Lady of the Western world.
She believed politics and law were everything. That was the passion of her life. That was what drove her. She said, “Let us resist the blandishments of the faint hearts.
Let us ignore the howls and threats of the extremists. Let us stand together and do our duty and we shall not fail. “
