Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s only female Prime Minister to date, has died peacefully today from a stroke at home in London’s Belgravia. She was 87.
She grew up in the harsh economic times of the 1930s, the second daughter of shopkeeper Alfred Roberts, whose own political ambitions were limited to the role of local councillor. Whether her will to succeed came from the knowledge that her father would have preferred a son and her desire to please him and not disappoint one can only guess. She studied Chemistry at Oxford, then Law and became a barrister, during which time she unsuccessfully tried to become an MP, only finally entering parliament in 1959 at a time when the Conservatives were on the way out. She would endure 11 years in opposition before receiving her first Cabinet post as Education Secretary in 1972. She fought Edward Heath for the leader of the party in 1975 and won the General Election of 1979 to become Prime Minister at a time of perceived national identity crisis for Britain. It was a post she would hold for 11 years.
An often controversial figure, she was a proponent of “housewife economics” determining that a government could not spend more than it could afford, closing many unprofitable industries such a mining and steel and thereby increasing the dole queues to which she was accused of being headstrong, uncaring and insensitive. It was these very qualities which at a time of national crisis during the Falklands War with Argentina came to be seen as strengths by some and won her the General Election of 1983. Thereafter with tax cuts for those in work and an opposition in disarray she kept 40% of the electorate on her side, which was enough to give her another landslide victory in 1987.
However she always attracted controversy and some say she revelled in it. At a Scottish Church convention she stated: “There is no such thing as society” and from that time on she made enemies who would ultimately oust her from office in 1990. The poll tax riots that year were as damaging to her as they had been to the ruling classes in Watt Tyler’s time 600 years before. In foreign policy she was unswervingly unbending with her relations with the European Union, a caricature circulating at the time was her banging her handbag at the conference table in Paris and stating: “We want our money back”. She got some of it in the form of a rebate the French to this day label contemptuously as “le cheque britannique”.
Unmoved, Margaret Thatcher once said “all our problems come from Europe”, a reference to the war years which had so formed her character as a Little Englander. On one summit she changed the flags around the European table so she didn’t have the German flag near. This cost Britain dear in 1992 when the Bundesbank failed to rescue sterling and in another national humiliation the pound fell out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the precursor to the Euro. Her inexperience of foreign policy showed again during the reunification of Germany debate, overestimating her own influence on the subject. On the occasion of the first Iraq war she told George Bush “not to go wobbly on me now”, and her many enemies at home who feared another “ Falklands Factor” in the polls vowed to get rid of her. She resigned as Prime Minister rather than face and lose a leadership contest, though her preferred candidate as successor John Major did take up the mantle. She commented ominously that “I’m a good back seat driver”.
However time was not on her side, and Britain desired more social change in terms of the introduction of a minimum wage, the abolition of hereditary peers, the rebuilding of infrastructure and other legislation protecting the rights of minorities. It was Tony Blair who copied her presidential style and managed to cling onto office for 10 years. Margaret had during this time suffered a series of small strokes and was advised by doctors to end any public speaking. A tell-all book by daughter Carol in 2008 disclosed her mother’s fight with dementia, as depicted unwisely in the Meryl Streep film The Iron Lady. Whether twins Carol and Mark had resented their mother’s absence as children as she climbed the greasy pole there was surely no excuse for their widowed mother to spend her last Christmas alone in 2012.
What she saw benignly as giving people more of their own money to spend and not wasted by central government others saw as a lack of responsibility to society as a whole, in particular to the unemployed who never benefited one penny in tax cuts for those in work. With international forces at work with the likes of competition from Germany, China and the Far East ,Britain once again found it couldn’t compete in traditional industries and found itself over-reliant on the banking and service sector. It seemed as if these jobs, primarily in the North were of secondary importance to Margaret Thatcher, where she was never as popular as in her territory of the Home Counties, and economic mistakes were made. In the stand-alone jungle which now pertains in modern-day Britain with concerted attempts to curtail an ever-growing welfare state one might well recall the remark of Danton: “The Revolution devours its own children”. Nothing could be a more fitting epitaph for Margaret Thatcher.
