The British inflation was in 1975 up at 24, 11% [] and with the union's constant claim for higher salaries, nobody expected it to drop to a normal level. Governments can rarely claim to have stimulated the arts but Thatcher, always rather impatient with the examined life, drew writers on to new ground. be a nation in retreat". That was the daunting task Margaret Thatcher set herself when she arrived in Downing Street in May 1979 at the end of a traumatic decade that had seen a three-day week, inflation topping 25%, a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the winter of discontent. Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures. . Margaret Thatcher. Sharp definition, hard edges, no effort at fuzzy contours (David Cameron, take note). for turning. Charles Powell was a senior foreign policy . Maybe my memory is fanciful. It led to riots that nobody needed. Margaret Thatcher is being remembered as the prime minister who remade Britain's economy, the "Iron Lady" who stood up to communism and who fought and won a war in the distant South Atlantic . speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. A Tory party desperate for women helped Thatcher through the political foothills to early success as an MP. Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. The fact is that if both sides removed their ideological blinkers, as Thatcher, remarkably perhaps, managed to do, then her trilogy of speeches in the late 1980s still offer some of the best and . The Crown Season 4 brings with it a whole lot of change for Queen Elizabeth II's family and, more importantly, the United Kingdom. It came to a head over her most egregious policy failure, Europe. As coal, steel and shipbuilding fell under her wrecking ball, whole communities were destroyed. Just look around. Margaret Thatcher might seem to some like an unlikely pioneer of the need for climate action but, in the late 1980s, she made a series of remarkable speeches and interventions on the subject and . It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. When President Reagan died in June 2004, she delivered a She, and Blair after her, brought an unprecedented dirigisme to the NHS, education, police and local government. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. verbatim and in context. But it was overlaid by the supposedly masculine virtues, sometimes more manly than the men could ever assemble. The author Nassim Taleb traded equations on a whiteboard with Gus O'Donnell, then head of the civil service, as they debated econometrics; at another, I watched entranced as Lord Heseltine argued urban policies with Harvard's Ed Glaeser. opportunities. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. A massive programme of social housing would be a good place to start, stimulating the economy. The Independent has the story. The truth is less significant than the alteration to it. She was a radical conservative, known for dismantling nationalized industries and social services, weakening union power.She was also the first incumbent prime minister in the UK removed on a vote of their own party. John Major was elected her successor yesterday by Conservative Party members. Leaving aside the detail that the word "feminist" came into existence in 1895, comfortably in Chanel's lifetime, the woman who valued femininity above all other qualities in a woman and was heavily involved with the Nazis, including a wartime relationship with German officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage, could not, in any circumstances, be described as a feminist. Absurd or not, it does indeed seem alien not least to those born in the 1980s, the generation we shall always call Thatcher's children. It was a watershed moment in Irish politics. She abolished city-wide local government, capped spending and expected the poll tax to further undermine alternative voices. She all but erased his political legacy to stamp her own image on the nation, so Britain before and after Thatcher were two different countries. Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. Instead state assets and a huge income stream from North sea oil were used to fund a populist programme of tax cuts, privatisation and council housesales. Whatever else may be true of her, Thatcher engaged in incredibly consequential acts that affected millions of people around the world. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979, she So the woman I met in Curzon Street, dimpling elegantly, can now be seen in history with an unexpected achievement to her credit. Perhaps Labour would benefit from another defeat, given the danger of taking power unprepared and turning into a zombie government, like the tragedy unfurling in France. It was under her leadership that in 1982 that the Force Research Unit (FRU) was established within the British Army Intelligence Corps. Everyone knows that. At a banquet in Belgrade the press sat next to the so-called "Garden Girls", who were the secretaries at No 10. No sign they learned from her that markets don't move in to fill the gaps when the state is rolled back not then, not now. But now the history was what mattered. I met her just once, as a reporter in the press pack that followed her tour around Greece and Yugoslavia in 1980. In towns and valleys poleaxed by the Iron Lady, there may be glasses raised at her passing. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community. Three separate pieces of legislation between 1980 and 1984 attacked the closed shop, toughened up the laws on picketing and imposed secret strike ballots. By the close of her premiership, he was probably the most trusted member of her political team at Downing Street, and he left Number Ten with her. talked of "Victorian Values". Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. The most widely used measure of income differences shows inequality increasing by more than a third during her period in office. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends"). morning, Available for everyone, funded by readers. One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. Thatcher exposed the sharp edges of class division in Britain and the strike of 1984/5 was as much a clash of values as it was about pit closures. Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. Howe's "broken cricket bats" speech in the Commons was the killer blow. "What's going on there, mate?" If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies. No children excluded from school activities because mothers couldn't pay. . successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to No single mother raising children was to be called "workless", skipping meals to feed them and forced to ditch them to submit to "workfare" or a starvation wage. Thatcher's unwavering belief in the invisible hand of the market meant that she did not believe it was part of her job description to put anything in its place. Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" Steel or Thomas why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. defended Ronald In a way, they are all Thatcher's children.". be a nation in retreat". She was lucky, in her enemies and friends notably Reagan in the Falklands conflict. Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. This is not the Highland way. Your local electricity "board" could be a very unfriendly place. Her defenders always insisted that sentence had been misunderstood, but it stuck because it seemed to capture something essential about the Thatcherite creed: its embrace of individualism and apparent disdain for the collective. The eulogy is a good illustration of Thatcher's feelings for . When the late Christopher Hitchens was a political reporter for the New Statesman, he corrected the prime minister on a point of fact, and she was quick to correct Hitchens in turn. My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), who in 1979 would become Great Britain's first female Prime Minister, traveled to the United States and Canada in September 1975, seven months after becoming the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, then out of power. A splendid synergy was created, deliberately and with just that in mind on both sides of the Atlantic. To enrich the global 1% she so brilliantly represented, our "entitlement" had to go and she was just the one to do it. The price we all continue to pay for Thatcherite policies is to live in a less cohesive and more antisocial society, in which community life is weaker, people feel less able to trust each other and fewer of those in government have the experience and compassion to represent or understand the vast majority. She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. A strong pound crippled exports and emptied factories. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. Margaret Thatcher's government defended structured political and religious discrimination and political vetting in the north, legislated for political censorship and institutionalised, to a greater extent than ever before, collusion between British state forces and unionist death squads. Emery Evans . What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. In January 1983 she She was lucky in surviving the IRA's bomb. The left misleads us and maybe itself when it says that Thatcher's policies, extended by New Labour and then by the coalition, have failed. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. During Margaret Thatcher's rise to the top, he was one of the backroom figures whose words helped create her reputation as the Iron Lady. for the disk. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. No one noticed, but she was Blair's first guest at Downing Street in 1997. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) Margaret Thatcher's speech writer will miss funeral but 'shed a tear' When the mourners gather for Baroness Thatcher's funeral tomorrow, one important figure from her political past will be . Beleagured Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher makes pun during the 1981 Conservative Party conference speech: "the lady's not for turning" she says to her crit. But if today's Guardian readers time-travelled to the late 70s they might be irritated to discover that tomorrow's TV listings were a state secret not shared with daily newspapers. in his defence during the IranContra affair, told When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. She hated what she called "that French phrase laissez faire". John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. Police charges against picketing union printers in Wapping enabled the Murdoch empire to flourish, ensuring their power and hers. She forced us to decide what was truly important. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. Many hated her. The authors show just how much . Therein, 30 years ago, lay the great Thatcher asset and the electorally lethal Thatcher impact in Scotland. Debate continues on whether Margaret Thatcher saved or destroyed British industry, but there is one industry that she practically created. Which raises the question: why isn't this happening now? In former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's eulogy speech for President Ronald Reagan (2004), she elucidates what a kind and powerful man he was. Simon Heffer, journalist, historian and friend of Margaret Thatcher, recommends the best books to read to gain an understanding of the United Kingdom's first female prime ministerand explains why she was the most influential British leader of the modern era. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. This is a style whose absence is much missed. From 1987 to 1988, he was a senior policy writer and speechwriter in 10 Downing Street for Margaret Thatcher when she was British prime minister and remained close to her up to her death.. O'Sullivan served from 2008-2012 as vice-president and executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio . Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81. Thatcher's opposition to a positive role for the state in industrial policy caused her grief even during her time in office, but a cross-party consensus newly shaped by Michael Heseltine's report has given him the last word.