Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, the first woman to hold the office and the longest continuously serving prime minister of the twentieth century. Her governments cut the power of the trade unions, sold state-owned industries, fought the Falklands War and stood close to the United States in the late Cold War. The set of free-market policies associated with her, known as Thatcherism, reshaped British politics, and her record remains fiercely debated.

She was born Margaret Hilda Roberts on 13 October 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where her father, Alfred Roberts, ran a grocer's shop and was a Methodist lay preacher and local councillor. She later credited him with her belief in thrift, hard work and self-reliance. She won a place at Somerville College, Oxford, to study chemistry, and was president of the university's Conservative Association. After graduating she worked as a research chemist.

She stood unsuccessfully for parliament in 1950 and 1951. In 1951 she married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman, and their twins, Mark and Carol, were born in 1953. She then qualified as a barrister, specialising in tax law. In 1959 she was elected Member of Parliament for Finchley in north London, a seat she held until 1992.

Thatcher held junior posts in the early 1960s and joined Edward Heath's cabinet as Secretary of State for Education in 1970. Her decision to end free milk for schoolchildren over the age of seven earned her the label "Thatcher, milk snatcher". After the Conservatives lost both elections of 1974, she challenged Heath for the party leadership and won in February 1975. Influenced by free-market economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, she argued that Britain's economic decline was caused by high taxes, state control of industry and over-mighty unions. In 1976 a Soviet army newspaper called her the "Iron Lady", a nickname she embraced. After the strikes of the "Winter of Discontent" in 1978–1979, the Conservatives won the general election of May 1979.

Her government cut income tax, raised indirect taxes and tried to control inflation by limiting the money supply and public borrowing. Inflation fell, but a deep recession followed: manufacturing output dropped sharply and unemployment rose above three million. Riots broke out in Brixton, Toxteth and other cities in 1981. She refused to change course, declaring in 1980 that "the lady's not for turning". Council tenants were given the right to buy their homes at a discount, and over a million did so in the following decade. In Northern Ireland, she refused to grant political status to imprisoned republican hunger strikers, ten of whom died in 1981.

In April 1982 Argentina's military government occupied the Falkland Islands, a British territory in the South Atlantic. Thatcher sent a naval task force, which retook the islands by mid-June. About 255 British and 649 Argentine servicemen were killed, and three islanders died. The sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, with the loss of 323 lives, remains controversial. The victory, together with a divided opposition, helped her win a landslide in 1983. The defeat in turn hastened the fall of the junta in Argentina.

The central domestic conflict of her second term was the miners' strike of 1984–1985, called against plans to close pits. The government had prepared coal stocks and police resources, the National Union of Mineworkers held no national ballot, and after a year the strike collapsed. Most of Britain's coal industry closed over the following decade. Further laws restricted strikes and picketing, and union membership fell steeply.

In October 1984 the Provisional IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative conference, killing five people; Thatcher narrowly escaped. A year later she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave the Irish government a consultative role in Northern Ireland. Her governments privatised many state companies, including British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways and the water and electricity industries, and the deregulation of the City of London in 1986, the "Big Bang", helped make it a global financial centre. She won a third election in 1987.

Thatcher formed a close partnership with the United States president Ronald Reagan, allowing American cruise missiles to be based in Britain and American bombers to fly from British bases to attack Libya in 1986. She was among the first Western leaders to engage with Mikhail Gorbachev, saying in 1984 that she could "do business" with him. In Europe she won a large rebate on Britain's budget contributions in 1984 and signed the Single European Act, which created the single market, but in her Bruges speech of 1988 she warned against a European "super-state", setting out the Euroscepticism that later divided her party. She opposed economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa, and was initially wary of the reunification of Germany in 1990.

Her last years in office were troubled by rising inflation, disputes within the cabinet over Europe, and the community charge, a flat-rate local tax per adult widely called the poll tax, which provoked mass protests and a riot in London in March 1990. In November 1990 her former deputy Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned with a damaging speech, and Michael Heseltine challenged her for the leadership. She fell just short of outright victory in the first ballot and, advised that she would lose, resigned on 28 November 1990. John Major succeeded her.

She was made a life peer as Baroness Thatcher in 1992, wrote two volumes of memoirs and continued to speak on Europe and foreign affairs until a series of small strokes ended her public life. Denis Thatcher died in 2003. She died at the Ritz Hotel in London on 8 April 2013, aged 87, and was given a ceremonial funeral at St Paul's Cathedral.

Supporters argue that Thatcher reversed Britain's economic decline, tamed inflation and disruptive strikes, spread home and share ownership, and restored national self-confidence, and that the Labour governments of Tony Blair accepted much of what she had done. Critics argue that her policies destroyed industrial communities in Scotland, Wales and northern England, deepened inequality and regional division, left a legacy of long-term unemployment and run-down public services, and that selling council houses without replacing them contributed to later housing shortages. Polls continue to show the British sharply divided over her, and she is widely seen as one of the most consequential British prime ministers since Winston Churchill.