Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher redirects here. For other meanings see Thatcher (disambiguation).

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS (born 13 October 1925) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990.

Thatcher was the longest-serving British Prime Minister since Gladstone, and had the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the early nineteenth century. She is also the only woman to have served as Prime Minister or as 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 has tended to attract both strong support and strong opposition.

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, was active in local politics (serving as an Alderman), and was a Methodist lay preacher. Roberts came from a Liberal family but stood—as was then customary in local government—as an Independent. He lost his post as Alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority on Grantham Council in 1950. 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]

Thatcher performed well academically, attending a girls' grammar school (Kesteven) and subsequently going up to Somerville College, Oxford in 1944 to study 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. She was also a member of the Association of Scientific Workers.

Political career between 1950 and 1970

Margaret Thatcher

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's studies for the Bar. She qualified as a barrister in 1953, the same year that her twin children Carol and Mark were born. As a lawyer she specialised in tax law.

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 (Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960) 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 for school-children aged seven to eleven (Labour had already abolished it for secondary schools). This led to one of the more unflattering names for her, "Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher". 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.[2] This provoked a storm of public protest. She also successfully resisted library book charges.

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 saved the Open University from being abolished. The Chancellor Iain Macleod wanted to abolish it to save money and he viewed it as a gimmick by Harold Wilson. Thatcher believed it was a relatively cheap way of extending opportunities to adults who had missed out on university education when they were younger.

After the Conservative defeat in February 1974, she was promoted again, to Shadow Environment Secretary. In this job she promised to abolish the rating system that paid for local government services, which proved a popular policy within the Conservative Party.

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.

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 January 1978, she said "people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture", arousing particular controversy at the time.[3] She received 10,000 letters thanking her for raising the subject and the Conservatives gained a lead against Labour in the opinion polls, from both parties at 43% before the speech to 48% for Conservative and 39% for Labour immediately after.John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher: The Grocer's Daughter (Jonathan Cape, 2000), p. 400. Her expressed sentiments have been viewed by some as drawing supporters of the British National Front to the Conservative fold.

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[4]) to attack the government's record over unemployment and its 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 43-seat majority in the House of Commons and Thatcher became the United Kingdom's first female Prime Minister.

As Prime Minister

1979â€"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, doubling the one million unemployed she inherited from Labour.

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 â€" 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. (See: Falklands War)

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at Camp David.

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.

1983â€"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 Conservative government then went on to close all but 15 pits, before privatisation in 1994.

Following the arrest of the Coventry Four for breaching the UN arms embargo against apartheid South Africa in March 1984, and their repatriation to South Africa on bail, 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. She reportedly urged President Botha to end apartheid; to release Nelson Mandela; to halt the harassment of black dissidents; to stop the bombing of ANC bases in front-line states; and to comply with UN Security Council resolutions and withdraw from Namibia.John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher: The Iron Lady (Jonathan Cape, 2003), p. 324. However Botha ignored these demands. In an interview with Hugo Young for The Guardian in July 1986, Thatcher expressed her belief that economic sanctions against South Africa would be immoral because they make thousands of black workers unemployed.Hugo Young, Supping with the Devils (Atlantic, 2003), p. 6. Because Pik Botha refused to allow the Coventry Four to return to England for their trial in the autumn of 1984, the £200,000 bail money had to be surrendered to the High Court.

On the early morning of October 12, 1984, the day before her 59th birthday, Thatcher escaped injury in the Brighton hotel bombing when the hotel she was staying in for the Conservative Party Conference was bombed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. 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 injured if not for the fact that she was delayed from using the bathroom (which suffered more damage than the room she was in at the time the IRA bomb detonated).[5] 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 with Irish Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald, the first time a British government gave the Republic of Ireland a say (albeit advisory) in the governance of 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 who still adhered 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 credit 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. [6] 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.

1987â€"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. 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. [7]. 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.[8]

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 their demands were not agreed to by Thatcher.Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, 1993), p. 712. 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.

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.[9]

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.

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, 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 (in particular, high interest rates of 15%, which were eroding her support base among homeowners and businesspeople), and the divisions opening in the Conservative Party over European integration made her and her party seem increasingly politically vulnerable.

On 1 November 1990, Sir Geoffrey Howe, one of Thatcher's oldest and staunchest supporters, resigned from his position as Deputy Prime Minister in protest at Thatcher's European policy. Her long-standing adversary Michael Heseltine subsequently challenged her for the leadership of the party, and attracted sufficient support in the first round of voting to prolong the contest to a second ballot. Though she initially stated that she intended to contest the second ballot, Thatcher decided, after consulting with her Cabinet colleagues, to withdraw from the contest. On 22 November, at just after 9.30 am, she announced to the Cabinet that she would not be a candidate in the second ballot. Shortly afterwards, her staff made public what was, in effect, her resignation statement:

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 a debate in the House of Commons on a motion of 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".Dennis Kavangah, The Reordering of British Politics: Politics after Thatcher (OUP, 1997), p. 134. 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 did, however, occasionally speak in the House of Commons after she was Prime Minister. She retired from the House at the 1992 election.

Post-political career

Margaret Thatcher visits the former Chilean ex-president Augusto Pinochet during his house arrest in London, in 1998

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 a hereditary 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 hereditary 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".[10] 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.[11]

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".Campbell, The Iron Lady, p. 769. 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".Ibid, p. 770.

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 the 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, tax increases and his more favourable attitude to European integration. After Tony Blair's election as Labour Party leader in 1994, Lady 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".[12]

In the Conservative leadership election in the aftermath of the Conservatives landslide defeat by New Labour, Lady Thatcher supported William Hague after Kenneth Clarke entered into an alliance with John Redwood and looked like winning. Thatcher toured the tea room of the House of Commons, urging Conservative MPs to vote for Hague.

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 [13]). Pinochet had been a key ally in the Falklands War. Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet are both members of the Rotary International. 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 general election campaign in 2001. In the Conservative leadership election shortly after, Lady Thatcher came out in support of Iain Duncan Smith because she believed he would "make infinitely the better leader" than Kenneth Clarke due to Clarke's "old-fashioned views of the role of the state and his unbounded enthusiasm for European integration".[14]

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.[15]

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.

In December 2004 it was reported that Thatcher had told a private meeting of Conservative MPs that she was against the British Government's plan to introduce identity cards. She is said to have remarked that ID cards were a "Germanic concept and completely alien to this country".[16]

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, due to the ideological political climate of the time, brought out strong reactions from different sides of the political spectrum, an example being left wing Arthur Scargill's avid opposition to her economic reforms. Likewise, her legacy is highly disputed.

Some people credit 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. However, free marketeers and pro-privitisation business leaders and economists say that it is quite the opposite, citing the recovery of the economy during the mid-1980s and the present day success of the British economy with lower unemployment due to higher levels of service sector employment.

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.

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 traditional heavy industry, despite the subsequent boom in service industries.

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 51% in 1979 to just under 39% 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. This geographical imbalance in Thatcher's support led to wide-spread feelings of alienation in Scotland, Wales and the English regions, and contributed directly to the growth of devolution movements in those areas.

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 â€" 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" [17] to reporter Douglas Keay, for 'Womans Own' magazine, 23 September 1987 [18],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.

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. 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. Ministers clandestinely relaxed official guidelines to help private companies sell machine tools which were used in munitions factories. The British company Racal exported sophisticated Jaguar V radios to the former Iraqi dictator's army on credit. 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.

Many on both the right and left agree that Thatcher had a transformative effect on the British political spectrum 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"New Statesman.

Titles and honours

The arms of Margaret Thatcher. The admiral represents the Falklands War, the image of Sir Isaac Newton her background as a chemist and her birth town Grantham.

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 entitled to full membership rights.

Foreign Honours

*Presidential Medal of Freedom
*Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom

See also

* Thatcherism
* Euroscepticism
* Thatcher effect
* Thatcher Ministry
* Sermon on the Mound
* UK miners' strike (1984-1985)
* Poll tax
* Privatization

Notes

References

Books

Statecraft: Strategies for Changing World by Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 2002) ISBN 0060199733
The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher by Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1999) ISBN 0060187344
The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher by Margaret Thatcher, Robin Harris (editor) (HarperCollins, 1997) ISBN 0002557037
The Path to Power by Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1995) ISBN 0002550504
The Downing Street Years by Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1993) ISBN 0002553546

Biographies

The Anatomy of Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin (Flamingo, 1992) ISBN 0006862438
Margaret Thatcher; Volume One: The Grocer's Daughter by John Campbell (Pimlico, 2000) ISBN 0712674187
Margaret Thatcher; Volume Two: The Iron Lady by John Campbell (Pimlico, 2003) ISBN 0712667814
Memories of Maggie Edited by Iain Dale (Politicos, 2000) ISBN 190230151X
Britain Under Thatcher by Anthony Seldon & Daniel Collings (Longman, 1999) ISBN 0582317142
Thatcher for Beginners by Peter Pugh and Paul Flint (Icon Books, 1997) ISBN 1874166536
One of Us: Life of Margaret Thatcher by Hugo Young (Macmillan, 1989) ISBN 0333344391
The Iron Lady: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher by Hugo Young (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1989) ISBN 0374226512
Margaret, daughter of Beatrice by Leo Abse (Jonathan Cape, 1989) ISBN 0224027263
Mrs. Thatcher's Revolution: Ending of the Socialist Era by Peter Jenkins (Jonathan Cape, 1987) ISBN 0224025163
The Thatcher Phenomenon by Hugo Young (BBC, 1986) ISBN 0563204729

Ministerial autobiographies

Conflict of Loyalty by Geoffrey Howe (Macmillan, 1994)
The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical by Nigel Lawson (Bantam, 1992)
The Autobiography by John Major (HarperCollins, 1999)
Right at the Centre by Cecil Parkinson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992)
'My Style of Government': The Thatcher Years by Nicholas Ridley (Hutchinson, 1991) ISBN 0091750512
Upwardly Mobile by Norman Tebbit (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988)

External links

* Margaret Thatcher Foundation
* Thatcher's legacy: 25 years on
* Margaret Thatcher Chronology World History Database
* Margaret Thatcher in Procapitalism Op-Eds 2006.
* The Thatcher Era â€" written on the tenth anniversary of her resignation â€" 22 November 2000
* The George H. W. Bush Library 22 November 1990, President George H. W. Bush talks about Thatcher resignation
* On This Day 22 November â€" New York Times marks Thatcher's resignation
*Harold Hill: A People's History â€" Buying into the Iron Lady's Dream

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