Margaret Thatcher

• 1. Introduction

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  Margaret Hilda Thatcher arrived at 10 Downing Street on the 4th of May 1979 and kept a portrait of her Oxford chemistry tutor on the wall throughout her time there. That tutor was Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel laureate, and the choice said something about how Thatcher saw herself: not as a politician who had always been destined for office, but as a scientist who had risen through sheer force of preparation and will. She was the first woman to lead a major British political party and the first to become prime minister. She held that office for eleven years, longer than any other prime minister of the 20th century. A Soviet military journal called her the Iron Lady. She accepted the label immediately and made it her own. What made her remarkable was not just that she endured, but that she reshaped Britain so thoroughly that even her opponents could not undo what she had done. The questions worth asking are not simply what she achieved, but where she came from, what she believed, and why her legacy remains so bitterly contested.

• 2. A Grocer's Daughter

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  Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on the 13th of October 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, above a tobacconist's and grocery shop her father Alfred owned. Alfred Roberts was an alderman, a Methodist local preacher, and eventually Mayor of Grantham from 1945 to 1946. He raised his daughter in a strict Wesleyan Methodist tradition, attending Finkin Street Methodist Church, though the future scientist was already sceptical: she told a friend she could not believe in angels, having calculated that they would need a breastbone six feet long to support wings. In 1938 the Roberts family briefly sheltered a teenage Jewish girl who had escaped Nazi Germany. Margaret and her elder sister Muriel saved their pocket money to help pay for the girl's onward journey. Roberts attended Huntingtower Road Primary School and won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School. She was head girl in 1942-43 and volunteered as a fire watcher in the local Air Raid Precautions service while the war was ongoing. At school she was considered the star scientist, though one incident of mistaken advice about cleaning ink from parquetry nearly caused chlorine gas poisoning. She was accepted for a scholarship to study chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, entering in October 1943 after another candidate withdrew.

• 3. Chemistry and Conviction

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  At Oxford, Roberts studied under Dorothy Hodgkin, who had been Somerville's chemistry tutor since 1934 and later recalled that one could always rely on her student to produce a sensible, well-read essay. Roberts opted for a classified honours degree requiring an additional year of supervised research; Hodgkin assigned her to work with researcher Gerhard Schmidt on determining the structure of the antibiotic peptide gramicidin S. The peptide proved more complex than anticipated, and Schmidt would only solve its full structure much later. Roberts learned this in the 1960s when she visited the Weizmann Institute, where Schmidt was then working. She graduated in 1947 with a second-class honours degree and later received a Master of Arts as an Oxford BA was entitled to. Although Hodgkin eventually became critical of her former student's politics, the two continued to correspond into the 1980s, and Thatcher described her mentor in her memoirs as ever-helpful, a brilliant scientist and a gifted teacher. In later life Thatcher was reportedly prouder of being the first prime minister with a science degree than of being the first female prime minister. Beyond chemistry, she was shaped at university by Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, which argued that government economic intervention was a precursor to an authoritarian state. She became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946, and her boyfriend Tony Bray recalled that her enthusiasm for politics made her seem unusual. After Oxford, she worked briefly at British Xylonite in Colchester, then applied to Imperial Chemical Industries in 1948 but was rejected after the personnel department described her as headstrong, obstinate, and dangerously self-opinionated. She later moved to J. Lyons and Co. in Hammersmith, where she worked under Hans Jellinek on the saponification of a-monostearin. In 1979, by then a professor of physical chemistry at Clarkson University in the United States, Jellinek said she had done a very good job on the project, showing great determination.

• 4. The Path to Parliament

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  At a dinner in February 1949, following her formal adoption as Conservative candidate for Dartford, Roberts met Denis Thatcher, a successful businessman, who drove her to her Essex train. She described him to her sister Muriel after that first meeting as not a very attractive creature, very reserved but quite nice. They married in December 1951. She had lost twice to Labour's Norman Dodds in Dartford, in the 1950 and 1951 general elections, but reduced the Labour majority by 6,000 and then a further 1,000 votes. A prospective candidate who observed her at the time, Bill Deedes, recalled: once she opened her mouth, the rest of us began to look rather second-rate. She trained at the Inns of Court School of Law, qualified as a barrister in 1953 specialising in taxation, and that same year gave birth to twins Carol and Mark, delivered prematurely by Caesarean section. In April 1958 she was selected as the Conservative candidate for Finchley, narrowly beating Ian Montagu Fraser, and won the seat in the 1959 election. Her maiden speech was unusual: she used a lucky ballot result for backbenchers to speak in favour of her own private member's bill, the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960, requiring local authorities to hold council meetings in public. The bill became law. In October 1961 Harold Macmillan promoted her to the frontbench as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry for Pensions, making her the youngest woman in history to receive such a post. During the 1966 Conservative Party conference she attacked the Labour government's high-tax policies as steps not only towards Socialism but towards Communism, and argued that lower taxes served as an incentive to hard work.

• 5. Milk, Mines, and Monetarism

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  Edward Heath appointed Thatcher Secretary of State for Education and Science after the Conservative victory in the 1970 general election. Within days she withdrew Labour's Circular 10/65, which had tried to force comprehensivisation, without a consultation process. Though committed to preserving grammar schools, she turned down only 326 of 3,612 proposals for schools to go comprehensive during her tenure, roughly nine per cent; the proportion of pupils in comprehensive schools rose from 32 per cent to 62 per cent. She managed to save 94 grammar schools. Her most damaging act in the role was the abolition of free milk for schoolchildren aged seven to eleven, a decision she later admitted she had been forced into by the Treasury. Cabinet papers confirmed this, but the public storm earned her the nickname Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher. She told Harold Creighton, editor of The Spectator: don't underestimate me, I saw how they broke Keith, but they won't break me. When she became prime minister in 1979, her economic policy was shaped by monetarist thinking and advisers including Milton Friedman and Alan Walters. Her job approval rating fell to 23% by December 1980, lower than recorded for any previous prime minister. In March 1981 a statement signed by 364 leading economists argued there was no basis in economic theory for the government's belief that deflating demand would bring inflation permanently under control. By 1982 inflation had fallen to 8.6% from a high of 18%, but unemployment exceeded three million for the first time since the 1930s, peaking at 3.3 million in 1984. The miners' strike of 1984-85 became the most devastating confrontation of her government: the National Coal Board proposed closing 20 of 174 state-owned mines and cutting 20,000 of 187,000 jobs. Two-thirds of the country's miners, led by Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers, went on strike. After a year, the NUM leadership conceded without a deal. The cost to the economy was estimated at least £1.5 billion. The government closed 25 unprofitable mines in 1985 and by 1992 a total of 97 had closed. Trade union density fell from 57.3% in 1979 to 49.5% by 1985, and total membership dropped from 13.5 million to fewer than 10 million by the end of her premiership.

• 6. War, Iron, and Departure

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  On the 2nd of April 1982, Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands. Thatcher set up a small War Cabinet; by the 5th and the 6th of April it had authorised a naval task force. Argentina surrendered on the 14th of June. The deaths included 255 British servicemen and three Falkland Islanders; Argentine fatalities totalled 649. On the morning of the 12th of October 1984 she narrowly escaped injury when the Provisional IRA bombed the Brighton hotel where she was staying before the Conservative Party conference. Five people were killed, including the wife of minister John Wakeham. She insisted the conference open as scheduled the following day and delivered her speech as planned. In September 1982, as the first British prime minister to visit China, she met Deng Xiaoping to discuss Hong Kong's sovereignty after 1997. After two years of negotiations she signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration in Beijing in 1984, agreeing to hand over Hong Kong's sovereignty. The deregulation of UK financial markets in 1986, known as the Big Bang, fuelled an economic boom. More than £29 billion was raised from the sale of nationalised industries and another £18 billion from the sale of council houses. Thatcher was re-elected for a third term in June 1987 but her support for the Community Charge, also called the poll tax, proved deeply unpopular. A demonstration in London in March 1990 drew between 70,000 and 200,000 people; riots left 113 injured and 340 under arrest. By November 1990 the Conservatives had trailed Labour for 18 months. Geoffrey Howe, the last remaining member of her original 1979 cabinet, resigned as deputy prime minister on the 1st of November. In his resignation speech on the 13th of November, Howe described Thatcher's treatment of her colleagues on European policy as like a cricket captain who breaks the bats before the game begins. Michael Heseltine mounted a leadership challenge the following day. Though Thatcher led the first ballot with 204 votes to Heseltine's 152, she fell four votes short of the required 15% majority. On the 28th of November she left Downing Street in tears. Henry Kissinger and Mikhail Gorbachev both privately expressed consternation at her departure.

• 7. After Downing Street

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  Aged 66, Thatcher left the House of Commons at the 1992 general election, saying she wanted more freedom to speak her mind. She became the first former British prime minister to establish a foundation; the British wing of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation was later dissolved in 2005 due to financial difficulties. In July 1992 she was hired by the tobacco company Philip Morris as a geopolitical consultant for $250,000 per year, with a further $250,000 annual contribution to her foundation; she earned $50,000 for each speech she delivered. She wrote two volumes of memoirs, The Downing Street Years in 1993 and The Path to Power in 1995. In 1998 she called for the release of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet when Spain sought to try him for human rights violations, citing the help he had given Britain during the Falklands War. After several small strokes, her doctors advised her in March 2002 to cancel all planned speaking engagements. On the 26th of June 2003, her husband Sir Denis Thatcher died aged 88; his body was cremated on the 3rd of July at Mortlake Crematorium. On the 11th of June 2004, against her doctors' orders, she attended the state funeral for Ronald Reagan; she delivered her eulogy via videotape, pre-recorded months earlier given her health. She celebrated her 80th birthday on the 13th of October 2005 at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, with guests including the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Alexandra, and Tony Blair. Thatcher died of a stroke at the Ritz Hotel, London, on the 8th of April 2013, at the age of 87.