Margaret Thatcher

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The Right Honourable

The Baroness Thatcher
LG OM PC FRS

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

In office
4 May 1979 – 28 November 1990

Monarch Elizabeth II

William Whitelaw (1979–1988)

Deputy
Geoffrey Howe (1989–1990)

Preceded by James Callaghan

Succeeded by John Major

 Leader of the Opposition

In office
11 February 1975 – 4 May 1979

Monarch Elizabeth II

Harold Wilson
Prime Minister
James Callaghan

Preceded by Edward Heath

Succeeded by James Callaghan

Secretary of State for Education and Science

In office
20 June 1970 – 4 March 1974

Prime Minister Edward Heath

Preceded by Edward Short

Succeeded by Reginald Prentice

Member of Parliament
for Finchley

In office
8 October 1959 – 9 April 1992

Preceded by John Crowder

Succeeded by Hartley Booth

13 October 1925 (age 84)

Born
Grantham, Lincolnshire, UK

Nationality British

Political party Conservative

 Spouse(s) Sir Denis Thatcher, Bt (1951–2003)

The Hon. Carol Thatcher

Children
Sir Mark Thatcher, 2nd Bt

Alma mater Somerville College, Oxford

Leader
Statesperson
Profession Politician
Scientist (Chemist)
Lawyer

Religion Anglican,[1] Methodist before marriage

Signature

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher LG, OM, PC, FRS (born 13 October 1925)
served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the
Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She is the only woman to have held either post.[2]

Born in Grantham in Lincolnshire, England, she read chemistry at Somerville College,

Oxford and later trained as a barrister. She won a seat in the 1959 general election, becoming
the MP for Finchley as a Conservative. When Edward Heath formed a government in 1970,
he appointed Thatcher Secretary of State for Education and Science. Four years later, she
backed Keith Joseph in his bid to become Conservative Party leader but he was forced to
drop out of the election. In 1975 Thatcher entered the contest herself and became leader of
the Conservative Party. At the 1979 general election she became Britain's first female Prime
Minister.

In her foreword to the 1979 Conservative manifesto, Thatcher had written of "a feeling of
helplessness, that a once great nation has somehow fallen behind."[3] She entered 10 Downing
Street determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitate national decline,
characterised by a combination of high inflation, high unemployment and stagnant or slow
growth. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly
of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and the selling off of state owned companies.
Amid a recession and high unemployment, Thatcher's popularity decreased, though economic
recovery and the 1982 Falklands War brought a resurgence of support and she was re-elected
in 1983. She took a hard line against trade unions, survived the Brighton hotel bombing
assassination attempt and opposed the Soviet Union (her tough-talking rhetoric gained her the
nickname the "Iron Lady"); she was re-elected for an unprecedented third term in 1987. The
following years would prove difficult, as her Poll tax plan was largely unpopular, and her
views regarding the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She
resigned as Prime Minister in November 1990 after Michael Heseltine's challenge to her
leadership of the Conservative Party.
Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister was the longest since that of Lord Salisbury and the
longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century.[4] She was
the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom, and the first of only
three women to hold any of the four great offices of state. She holds a life peerage as
Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, which entitles her to sit in the
House of Lords.

Contents
[hide]

 1 Early life and education

 2 Early political career (1950–1970)
 3 Education Secretary (1970–1974)
 4 Leader of the Opposition (1975–1979)
 5 Prime Minister (1979–1990)
o 5.1 First government (1979–1983)
o 5.2 Second government (1983–1987)
o 5.3 Third government (1987–1990)
 6 Later years
o 6.1 After Parliament
o 6.2 Activities since 2003
o 6.3 Health
 7 Legacy
o 7.1 Honours
o 7.2 Cultural depictions
 8 Titles
 9 Notes
 10 References
 11 Further reading
 12 External links

Early life and education

The house where Margaret Thatcher was born in Grantham.

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on 13 October 1925 to Alfred Roberts, originally from
Northamptonshire, and his wife, the former Beatrice Ethel Stephenson from Lincolnshire.[5][6]
Thatcher spent her childhood in the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, where her father
owned two grocery shops.[7] She and her older sister Muriel (born 1921, Grantham;[8] died
December 2004; married name Cullen)[9] were raised in the flat above the larger of the two
located near the railway line.[10] Her father was active in local politics and religion, serving as
an Alderman and Methodist lay preacher. He 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.[11]

Margaret Roberts was brought up a strict Methodist by her father.[12] Having attended
Huntingtower Road Primary School, she won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls'
School.[13] Her school reports show hard work and commitment, but not brilliance. Outside
the classroom she played hockey and also enjoyed swimming and walking.[14] Finishing
school during the Second World War, she applied for a scholarship to attend Somerville
College, Oxford, but was only successful when the winning candidate dropped out.[15] She
went to Oxford in 1943 and studied Natural Sciences, specialising in Chemistry.[7][16] She
became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946, the third
woman to hold the post. At Oxford she read Friedrich von Hayek's recently published (1944)
The Road to Serfdom. " I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek's little
masterpiece at this time, [but] at this stage it was the..unanswerable criticisms of socialism in
The Road to Serfdom which had an impact." In 1946 Roberts took the Final Honour School
examination, graduating with a Second Class Bachelor of Arts degree. She subsequently
studied crystallography and received a postgraduate BSc degree in 1947. Three years later, in
1950, she achieved a Master of Arts advanced degree, according to her entitlement as an
Oxford BA of seven years' standing since matriculation.[7]

Following graduation, Roberts moved to Colchester in Essex, to work as a research chemist

for BX Plastics.[17] During this time she joined the local Conservative Association and
attended the party conference at Llandudno in 1948, as a representative of the University
Graduate Conservative Association.[18] She was also a member of the Association of
Scientific Workers. In January 1949, a friend from Oxford, who was working for the Dartford
Conservative Association, told her that they were looking for candidates.[18] After a brief
period, she was selected as the Conservative candidate, and she subsequently moved to
Dartford, Kent, to stand for election as a Member of Parliament. To support herself during
this period, she went to work for J. Lyons and Co., where she helped develop methods for
preserving ice cream and was paid £500 per year.[18]

Early political career (1950–1970)

At the 1950 and 1951 elections, she fought the safe Labour seat of Dartford.[7] Although she
lost out to Norman Dodds, she reduced the Labour majority in the constituency by 6,000.[19]
She was, at the time, the youngest ever female Conservative candidate and her campaign
attracted a higher than normal amount of media attention for a first time candidate.[7][20]
While active in the Conservative Party in Kent, she met Denis Thatcher, whom she married
in 1951,[21] conforming to his Anglicanism.[22] Denis was a wealthy divorced businessman
who ran his family's firm;[21] he later became an executive in the oil industry.[7] Denis funded
his wife's studies for the Bar.[23] She qualified as a barrister in 1953 and specialised in
taxation.[7] In the same year her twin children Carol and Mark were born,[24] delivered by
Caesarean section while their father watched a Test match at the Oval. With a mother
climbing the political ladder, the children were left to a nanny. "My mother was prone to
calling me by her secretaries' names and working through each of them until she got to
Carol," recalled her daughter.[25]

Thatcher began to look for a safe Conservative seat in the mid-1950s and was narrowly
rejected as candidate for the Orpington by-election in 1955, and was not selected as a
candidate in the 1955 election.[24] She had several further rejections before being selected for
Finchley in April 1958. She won the seat after hard campaigning during the 1959 election and
was elected as a Member of Parliament (MP).[26] Her maiden speech was in support of her
Private Member's Bill (Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960) requiring local
councils to hold meetings in public, which was successful. In 1961 she went against the
Conservative Party's official position by voting for the restoration of birching [27].

Within two years, in October 1961, she was given a promotion to the front bench as
Parliamentary Undersecretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance.[16] She held
this post throughout the administration of Harold Macmillan, until the Conservatives were
removed from office in the 1964 election.[7] When Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down,
Thatcher voted for Edward Heath in the leadership election of 1965 over Reginald
Maudling.[28] She was promoted to the position of Conservative spokesman on Housing and
Land; in this position, she advocated the Conservative policy of allowing tenants to buy their
council houses.[29] The policy would prove to be popular.[30] She moved to the Shadow
Treasury team in 1966. As Treasury spokesman, she opposed Labour's mandatory price and
income controls, which she argued would produce contrary effects to those intended and
distort the economy.[29]

Thatcher established herself as a potent conference speaker at the Conservative Party

Conference of 1966, with a strong attack on the high-tax policies of the Labour Government
as being steps "not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism".[29] She argued that
lower taxes served as an incentive to hard work.[29] Thatcher was one of few Conservative
MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to decriminalise male homosexuality and voted in favour of
David Steel's Bill to legalise abortion,[31] as well as a ban on hare coursing.[32][33] She
supported the retention of capital punishment and voted against the relaxation of divorce
laws.[34]

In 1967 she was selected by the Embassy of the United States in London to participate in the
International Visitor Leadership Program (then called the Foreign Leader Program), a
professional exchange program in which she spent about six weeks visiting various U.S.
cities, political figures, and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.[35] Later that
year, Thatcher joined the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Fuel spokesman. Shortly preceding the
1970 general election, she was promoted to Shadow Transport and, finally, Education.[36]

Education Secretary (1970–1974)

When the Conservative party under Edward Heath won the 1970 general election, Thatcher
became Secretary of State for Education and Science. In her first months in office, Thatcher
came to public attention as a result of the administration of Edward Heath's decision to cut
spending. She gave priority to academic needs in schools,[37] and imposed public expenditure
cuts on the state education system, resulting in, against her private protests, the abolition of
free milk for school-children aged seven to eleven.[38] She believed that few children would
suffer if schools were charged for milk, however she agreed to give younger children a third
of a pint, daily, for nutritional purposes.[38] This provoked a storm of protest from the Labour
party and the press,[39] and led to the unflattering moniker "Margaret Thatcher, Milk
Snatcher".[38] Of the experience, Thatcher later wrote in her autobiography, "I learned a
valuable lesson. I had incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political
benefit."[39]
She successfully resisted the introduction of library book charges. She did not volunteer
spending cuts in her department, contrary to her later beliefs.[38] Her term was marked by
support for several proposals for more local education authorities to close grammar schools
and to adopt comprehensive secondary education. Thatcher, committed to a tiered secondary
modern / grammar school system of education, was determined to preserve grammar schools,
which prepared more students for admission to universities.[37] She abolished Labour's
commitment to comprehensive schooling, and instead left the matter to local education
authorities.[37]

Leader of the Opposition (1975–1979)

Margaret Thatcher elected as Leader of the Opposition on 18 September 1975.

The Heath government experienced many difficulties between 1970 and 1974.[7] The
government executed a series of reversals in its economic policies, dubbed "U-turns".[7] The
Conservatives were defeated in the February 1974 general election, and Thatcher's portfolio
was changed to Shadow Environment Secretary.[16] In this position she promised to abolish
the rating system that paid for local government services, which was a favoured policy
proposal within the Conservative Party for many years.[40]

Thatcher thought that the Heath Government had lost control of monetary policy—and had
lost direction.[41] After her party lost the second election of 1974 in October, Thatcher,
determined to change the direction of the Conservative party, challenged Heath for the
Conservative party leadership.[42] She promised a fresh start, and her main support came from
the Conservative 1922 Committee.[42] Unexpectedly, she defeated Heath on the first ballot,
and he resigned the leadership.[43] On the second ballot, she defeated Heath's preferred
successor, William Whitelaw, and became Conservative Party leader on 11 February 1975.[44]
She appointed Whitelaw as her deputy. Heath remained disenchanted with Thatcher to the
end of his life for what he, and many of his supporters, perceived as her disloyalty in standing
against him.[45]

Now that the Heath government had fallen Thatcher , " renewed [her] reading of the seminal
works of liberal economics and conservative thought. I also regularly attended lunches at the
Institute of Economic Affairs where Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon and all those who had been
right, when we in Government had gone so badly wrong..were busy marking out a new path
for Britain. " (The IEA, a think tank founded by the poultry magnate Antony Fisher, the man
who brought battery farming to Britain and a disciple of Friedrich von Hayek, had become
the ideas factory of a new British Conservatism. Thatcher began visiting the IEA and reading
its publications during the early sixties.) Thatcher would now become the face of the
ideological movement that felt the opposite of reverence for the welfare state Keynesian
economics they believed was terminally weakening Britain. " Whatever the question the
institute's pamphlets posed, their answer was basicaly identical: less government, lower taxes,
more freedom for business and consumers." [46]

In these years Thatcher began to work on her image, specifically her voice and screen image.
"The hang-up has always been the voice" wrote the critic Clive James, in The Observer. "Not
the timbre so much as, well, the tone - the condescending explanatory whine which treats the
squirming interlocutor as an eight year old child with learning deficiencies. News Extra rolled
a clip from May 1973 demonstrating the Thatcher sneer at full pitch. She sounded like a cat
sliding down a blackboard." She worked to change this image and James acknowledged ;
"She's cold , hard , quick and superior, and smart enough to know that those qualities could
work for her instead of against." [47]

Thatcher appointed many of Heath's supporters to the Shadow Cabinet, for she had won the
leadership as an outsider and then had little power base of her own within the 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.

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.
—[48]

In response, the Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) gave her
the nickname "Iron Lady".[48] She took delight in the name and it soon became associated
with her image as having an unwavering and steadfast character. She was later nicknamed
"Attila the Hen" as well.[49]

In an interview in January 1978, Thatcher raised the prospect of the number of Pakistani and
Commonwealth Britons doubling to four million by the end of the century, remarking,
"people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a
different culture".[50] White liberals and black leaders,[citation needed] accused Thatcher of
pandering to xenophobia. Thatcher received 10,000 letters thanking her for raising the subject
of immigration, and the Conservatives, previously level with Labour on 43% in opinion polls,
took a 48% to 39% lead.[51]

The Labour Government was running into difficulties with industrial disputes and rising
unemployment, and eventually collapsing public services during the winter of 1978–79,
popularly dubbed the "Winter of Discontent". The Conservatives attacked the government's
unemployment record, and used advertising hoardings with the slogan Labour Isn't Working
to assist them.[52] The prominence of the advert was partly due to Denis Healey criticising
Saatchi & Saatchi for having staged the photograph with a group of twenty Young
Conservatives from South Hendon "photographed over and over". [53] The Saatchi campaign
unsettled Labour at a crucial moment. Unemployment would often be much worse in the next
decade without bringing down Thatcher's government. [54]

In the run up to the 1979 General Election, most opinion polls showed that voters preferred
James Callaghan of the Labour party as Prime Minister, even as the Conservative Party
maintained a lead in the polls. After a successful motion of no confidence in spring 1979,
Callaghan's Labour government fell. The Conservatives would go on to win a 44-seat
majority in the House of Commons and Margaret Thatcher became the United Kingdom's
first female Prime Minister.

Prime Minister (1979–1990)

Main article: Premiership of Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher's Ministry meets with Reagan's Cabinet at the White House, 1981

Thatcher became Prime Minister on 4 May 1979. Arriving at 10 Downing Street, she said, in
a paraphrase of St. Francis of Assisi:

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there
is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

Thatcher was incensed by one contemporary view within the British Civil Service that its job
was to manage the UK's decline from the days of Empire[citation needed] and she wanted the
country to assert a higher level of influence and leadership in international affairs. She
represented the newly energetic right wing of the Conservative Party and advocated greater
independence of the individual from the state and less government intervention.[55] She
became a very close ally, philosophically and politically, with President of the United States
Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980. During her tenure as Prime Minister she was said to need
just four hours' sleep a night.[56]

First government (1979–1983)

New economic initiatives

Thatcher's political and economic philosophy emphasised reduced state intervention, free
markets, and entrepreneurialism. She wished to end what she felt was excessive government
interference in the economy, and therefore privatized many nationally-owned enterprises and
sold public housing to tenants at cut prices.[57] Influenced by monetarist thinking as espoused
by Milton Friedman, she began her economic reforms by increasing interest rates to try to
slow the growth of the money supply and thereby lower inflation.[58] She also placed limits on
the printing of money and legal restrictions on trade unions, in her quest to tackle inflation
and trade union disputes, which had bedevilled the UK economy throughout the 1970s.[59] In
accordance with her anti-interventionist views, she introduced cash limits on public
spending[60] and reduced expenditures on social services such as education (until 1987)[61] and
housing.[59] Later, in 1985, as a deliberate snub, the University of Oxford voted to refuse
Thatcher an honorary degree in protest against her cuts in funding for higher education.[62]

% change in real
GDP and public spending terms
by functional classification 1979/80 to
1989/90[63]

GDP +23.3

Total government spending +12.9

Law and order +53.3

Employment and training +33.3

Health +31.8

Social security +31.8

Transport -5.8

Trade and industry -38.2

Housing -67.0

Defence -3.3[64]

At the time, some Heathite Conservatives in the Cabinet, the so-called "wets", expressed
doubt over Thatcher's "dry" policies.[65] Civil unrest in Britain resulted in the British media
discussing the need for a policy u-turn. At the 1980 Conservative Party conference, Thatcher
addressed the issue directly, armed with a speech written by the playwright Ronald Millar[66]
which included the lines: "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning!"[65]
Thatcher lowered direct taxes on income and increased indirect taxes instead,[67] as the Early
1980s recession deepened, despite concerns expressed in a letter from 364 leading
economists.[68] Unemployment soared, and in December 1981 Thatcher's job approval rating
fell to 25%, the lowest of her entire premiership, a lower rating than recorded for any
previous prime minister, although she remained more popular than her party.[69]

A month later, in January 1982, the worst post-war slump bottomed out,[69] inflation dropped
to 8.6% from an earlier high of 18%, and interest rates fell, although unemployment was now
in excess of 3,000,000 for the first time since the 1930s.[70]

Thatcher's job approval rating recovered to 32%.[69] By 1983, overall economic growth was
stronger and inflation and mortgage rates were at their lowest levels since 1970, though
manufacturing output had dropped 30% from 1978 and unemployment had more than
doubled to 3.6 million.[71]

The term "Thatcherism" came to refer to her policies as well as aspects of her ethical outlook
and personal style, including moral absolutism, nationalism, interest in the individual, and an
uncompromising approach to achieving political goals.[59] American author Claire Berlinski,
who wrote the biography There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, argues
repeatedly throughout the volume that it was this Thatcherism, specifically her focus on
economic reform, that set the United Kingdom on the path to recovery and long term growth.

Northern Ireland

Main article: 1981 Irish hunger strike

The hunger strike was begun by a number of Provisional IRA and Irish National Liberation
Army prisoners in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison to regain the status of political prisoners
which had been revoked five years earlier under the preceding Labour government.[72] Bobby
Sands began the strike, saying that he would fast until death unless prison inmates won
concessions over their living conditions.[72] Thatcher refused to countenance a return to
political status for the prisoners, famously declaring "Crime is crime is crime; it is not
political"[72] and felt that Britain should not negotiate with terrorists.[73] However, despite
holding this view in public, the British government made private contact with republican
leaders in a bid to bring the hunger strikes to an end.[74] After nine more men had starved to
death and the strike had ended, some rights were restored to paramilitary prisoners, but
official recognition of political status was not granted.[75]

Later that year, Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald established the Anglo-Irish
Inter-Governmental Council, which would act as a forum for meetings between the two
governments.[76] On 15 November 1985, Thatcher and FitzGerald signed the Hillsborough
Anglo-Irish Agreement; the first time a British government gave the Republic of Ireland an
advisory role in the governance of Northern Ireland.

The Falklands

Main article: Falklands War

On 2 April 1982, the ruling military junta in Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and
South Georgia, British overseas territories that Argentina claimed.[77] The following day,
Thatcher sent a naval task force to recapture the islands and eject the invaders.[77] The conflict
escalated from there, evolving into an amphibious and ground combat operation.[77]
Argentina surrendered on 14 June and the operation was hailed a great success,
notwithstanding the deaths of 255 British servicemen and three Falkland Islanders. 649
Argentinians also died, half of them after the cruiser ARA General Belgrano was torpedoed
by HMS Conqueror.[78] Victory in the South Atlantic brought a wave of patriotic enthusiasm
and support for the government.[67] Thatcher's personal approval rating rose from 30% to
59%, as measured by Mori, and from 29% to 52%, according to Gallup. Conservative support
climbed from 27% to 44%, while Labour's slipped from 34% to 27%.[79]

On 26 July 1982, a service of thanksgiving for the victory was held in St Paul's Cathedral,
and the Archbishop of Canterury Robert Runcie delivered a sermon which asked the
congregation to share the grief of both British and Argentinian mourners alike. Thatcher did
not approve. Privately, according to an aide, she agreed with Edward du Cann, Julian Amery
and other Tory MPs who saw the Runcie sermon as proof that the Government still had many
enemies who deserved denouncing. "Not the least of the Falklands after-effects was the start
of a long, sometimes venomous distancing, which continued through the 1980s, between the
leading representatives of Church and state. " [80]

1983 election

Economic recovery from the spring of 1982 bolstered the Thatcher government's
popularity,[67] and although many contemporary commentators saw the ensuing national poll
as a khaki election that was decided by the "Falklands factor", the war had produced a
disaggregated boost to Conservative support of no more than 3% for 3 months, suggesting
Thatcher's sustained improvement was due instead to successful macroeconomic
management.[81] She also faced a divided opposition: Labour was bitterly split;[67] the party
had responded to the New Cold War by moving to the left and adopting a policy of unilateral
nuclear disarmament, and had lost many senior leaders to the new Social Democratic Party in
alliance with the Liberal Party, preventing the formation of an electoral pact against the
Conservatives.[82] Labour leader Michael Foot was a left-winger and generally regarded as
unelectable,[83] while Conservatives viewed Thatcher as 'their greatest electoral asset'.[84] In
the June 1983 general election, the Conservatives won 42.4% of the vote, the Labour party
27.6% and the Alliance 25.4% of the vote.[85] Although the Conservatives' share of the vote
had fallen slightly (1.5%) since 1979, Labour's vote had fallen by far more (9.3%) and under
the first past the post system, the Conservatives won a landslide victory with a massive
majority.[82] This resulted in the Conservative party having an overall majority of 144
MPs.[85]

Second government (1983–1987)

Privatisation

The policy of privatisation has been called "a crucial ingredient of Thatcherism"[86]. After the
1983 election the sale of large state utilities to private companies accelerated.[67]

British Petroleum was privatised in stages in October 1979, September 1983 and November
1987; British Aerospace in January 1981 and 1985; the government share in British Sugar in
July 1981; Cable and Wireless in November 1981; Amersham International and National
Freight Corporation in February 1982; Britoil in November 1982 and August 1985;
Associated British Ports in February 1983; Jaguar in July 1984; British Telecom in
November 1984; the National Bus Company in October 1986; British Gas in December 1986;
British Airways in February 1987; the Royal Ordnance in April 1987; Rolls-Royce in May
1987; the British Airports Authority in July 1987; the Rover Group in August 1988; British
Steel in December 1988; the Regional Water Authorities in November 1989; Girobank in
July 1990; and the National Grid in December 1990.

In 1983 Thatcher also broke up and privatised British Shipbuilders, which had been
amalgamated and nationalised by Callaghan in 1977 in the lean times following the 1973 oil
crisis, and which still employed 86,000 people building naval and commercial vessels, many
in the north-east of England.[87][88] Few of the privatised shipyards subsequently survived
competition against East Asian cheap labour,[88] with the single largest private sector group,
BVT, now employing a fraction of the nationalised group's number, just over 7,000 people
working on Navy contracts in the Clyde and Portsmouth yards.[87]

The process of privatisation, especially the preparation of nationalised industries for

privatisation, was associated with marked improvements in performance, particularly in terms
of labour productivity.[89] But it is not clear how far this can be attributed to the merits of
privatisation itself. The "productivity miracle" observed in British industry under Thatcher
was achieved not so much by increasing the overall productivity of labour as by reducing
workforces and increasing unemployment.[90] A number of the privatised industries, such as
gas, water and electricity, were natural monopolies for which privatisation involved little
increase in competition. Furthermore, the privatised industries that underwent improvements
often did so while still under state ownership. For instance, British Steel made great gains in
profitability while still a nationalised industry under the government-appointed chairmanship
of Ian MacGregor, who faced down trade-union opposition to close plants and more than
halve the workforce.[91] Regulation was also greatly expanded to compensate for the loss of
direct government control, with the foundation of regulatory bodies like Ofgas, Oftel and the
National Rivers Authority.[92] Overall, there was no clear pattern between the degree of
competition, regulation and performance among the privatised industries.[93] While the output
and profits of the privatised companies grew, margins increased, and employment declined,
the exact relationship of these changes to privatisation is uncertain.[94]

Many people took advantage of share offers, although many sold their shares immediately for
a quick profit and therefore the proportion of shares held by individuals rather than
institutions did not increase. By the mid 1980s, the number of individual stockholders had
tripled, and the Thatcher government had sold 1.5 million publicly owned housing units to
their tenants.[59]

The privatisation of public assets was combined with deregulation of finance in an attempt to
fuel economic growth. Notably, in 1979 Geoffrey Howe abolished Britain's exchange
controls to allow more capital to seek profits overseas and the Big Bang of 1986 removed
many restrictions on the activities of the London Stock Exchange. The Thatcher government
encouraged the growth of the financial and service sectors to replace Britain's ailing
manufacturing industry. Susan Strange called this new financial growth model, flourishing in
Britain and America under Thatcher and Reagan, "casino capitalism" - as speculation and
trading in financial claims became a more important part of the economy than industry.[95]

Trade unions
Further information: Opposition to trade unions

Thatcher was committed to reducing the power of the trade unions, whose leadership she
accused of undermining parliamentary democracy and economic performance through
paralysing strike action.[96] Several unions launched strikes in response to legislation
introduced to curb their power, but resistance eventually collapsed.[97] Only 39% of union
members voted for Labour in the 1983 general election.[98] According to the BBC, Thatcher
"managed to destroy the power of the trade unions for almost a generation."[99]

The number of stoppages across the United Kingdom peaked at 4,583 in the crisis year of
1979 that brought Thatcher to power, with over 29 million working days lost. 1984, the great
year of industrial confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), saw 1,221
stoppages and over 27 million working days lost. Stoppages then fell steadily through the rest
of Thatcher's premiership, to 630 by 1990, with under 2 million working days lost, and
continued to fall thereafter.[69] Trade union membership also fell, from over 12 million in
1979 to 8.4 million in 1990.[69]

The miners' strike was the climax of the confrontation between the unions and the Thatcher
government. In March 1984 the NUM ordered a strike, without a national ballot,[100] in
opposition to National Coal Board proposals to close 20 pits out of 174 state-owned mines
and cut 20,000 jobs out of 187,000.[101][102][103] Two-thirds of the country's miners downed
tools.[102][104] Thatcher refused to meet the union's demands,[59] and said: "We had to fight the
enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is
much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty."[99]

Violence was common on the picket lines during the miners' strike; controversial police
tactics were used against strikers.[99] The strike resulted in at least three deaths.[101] Two
miners, Joe Green and David Jones, were crushed to death by lorries while picketing.[101][105]
Two miners, Dean Hancock and Russell Shankland, were sentenced to eight years'
imprisonment for the manslaughter of taxi driver David Wilkie who was taking a working
miner to his colliery.[106] Some 20,000 people were injured in the course of the strike.[107]
11,300 miners and their supporters were arrested and charged with criminal offences.[104][108]

The NUM's failure to ballot and the picket line violence and intimidation cost the strike
public support. A MORI poll in June 1984 found that 41% of people backed the Coal Board,
and 35% the miners. By August support for the Board had risen to 46%, while support for the
miners had fallen to 30%. The position remained unchanged at the end of the year. The
miners' strike also split the trade union movement, with lorry drivers, dockers and power
station employees crossing picket lines or handling coal.[108] The strike was described as "one
of the most aggressive trade union struggles since the 1926 General Strike",[105] with some
commentators even suggesting it was "the nearest the country had come to civil war for 400
years".[104] Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie accused Thatcher personally of fostering
a "politics of confrontation", and blamed her policies for high unemployment, which he said
had created "despair about the future".[102]

After a year out on strike, in March 1985, the NUM leadership conceded without a deal. The
cost of the strike to the economy was estimated at least £1.5 billion. The strike was also
blamed for much of the pound's fall against the US dollar.[108] The government proceeded to
close 25 unprofitable pits in 1985; by 1992, a total of 97 pits had been closed,[109] with the
remaining being sold off and privatised in 1994.[110] These actions had great effect on the
industrial and political complexion of the country.[100] The eventual closure of 150 collieries,
not all of which were losing money, resulted in a loss of tens of thousands of jobs and
devastated entire communities,[109][111] delivering a blow from which the coal industry, with
50 mines employing 6,000 people, has barely begun to recover, with plans for 58 new open-
cast mines and up to a dozen new deep mines.[111]

Brighton bombing

Main article: Brighton hotel bombing

Thatcher with US First Lady Nancy Reagan at 10 Downing Street, 1986

On the early morning of 12 October 1984, the day before her 59th birthday, Thatcher
narrowly escaped injury in the Brighton hotel bombing carried out by the Provisional Irish
Republican Army.[112] Five people were killed in the attack, including the wife of Cabinet
Minister John Wakeham; a prominent member of the Cabinet, Norman Tebbit, was injured,
and his wife Margaret was left paralysed. Thatcher was staying at the hotel to attend the
Conservative Party Conference, and insisted that the conference open on time the next
day.[112] She delivered her speech as planned in defiance of the bombers,[113] a gesture which
won widespread approval across the political spectrum, and measurably enhanced her
personal popularity with the public.[114] A Gallup poll that month found her personal approval
rating up from 40% to 50%, and the Conservative lead over Labour widening from 1% to
12%.[69]

Cold War

Main article: Cold War

Thatcher took office in the final decade of the Cold War, a period of strategic confrontation
between the Western powers and the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pactsatellites. During her
first year as prime minister she supported NATO's decision to deploy U.S. Cruise missiles
and Pershing missiles in Western Europe.[97] She permitted the United States to station more
than 160 nuclear cruise missiles at Greenham Common, arousing mass protests by the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[97]

Thatcher became closely aligned with the policies of U.S. President Ronald Reagan (1981–
1989), and their closeness produced transatlantic cooperation.[97] His policy of deterrence
against the Soviets 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.

Thatcher was among the first Western leaders to respond warmly to reformist Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev. They met in London in 1984, three months before he became General
Secretary. Thatcher declared that she liked him, and told Reagan, saying, "we can do business
together".[97] Following the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings from 1985 to 1988, as well
as multiple reforms enacted by Gorbachev in the USSR, Thatcher declared in November
1988, "We're not in a Cold War now" but rather in a "new relationship much wider than the
Cold War ever was."[115] She continued, "I expect Mr Gorbachev to do everything he can to
continue his reforms. We will support it."[115]

Thatcher initially opposed German reunification, telling Premier Gorbachev that ―this would
lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development
would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our
security.‖ She expressed concern that a united Germany would align itself closer with the
Soviet Union and move away from NATO.[116] Recent records attribute Gorbachev as stating
that "the West doesn’t want German reunification but wants to use us to prevent it", possibly
because of the line taken by Thatcher and other European leaders such as France's Mr
Mitterrand who was even thinking of a military alliance with Russia to stop it, ―camouflaged
as a joint use of armies to fight natural disasters‖.[117]

Thatcher's premiership outlasted the Cold War, which ended in 1989, and those who share
her views on it credit her with a part in the West's victory, by both the deterrence and détente
postures.

Nuclear deterrent

In March 1982 Thatcher approved the modernisation of the strategic nuclear force by
ordering a new generation of Trident submarines to replace Polaris[118] at a cost of £10
billion,[119] creating 25,000 British jobs.[120] She justified the expenditure on the basis that the
United Kingdom was acquiring only the minimum deterrent against Soviet aggression and
rejected participation in START negotiations unless the U.S. and Soviet arsenals were
substantially reduced.[121] She committed the government to using savings from co-operation
with the United States in the nuclear field to strengthen British conventional forces.[118]

Hong Kong

On 19 December 1984, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping of the People's Republic of China
signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which committed Hong Kong to the status of a
Special Administrative Region. Britain agreed to leave the region in 1997.[122]

Bombing of Libya

In April 1986 Thatcher, after expressing initial reservations, permitted U.S. F-111s to use
RAF bases for the bombing of Libya in retaliation for the alleged Libyan bombing of a Berlin
discothèque,[123] citing the right of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter.[124]

Thatcher told the House of Commons: "The United States has more than 330,000 forces in
Europe to defend our liberty. Because they are there they are subject to terrorist attack. It is
inconceivable that they should be refused the right to use American aircraft and American
pilots in the inherent right of self-defence to defend their own people."[125]
The United Kingdom was the only nation to provide support and assistance for the U.S.
action.[125] Polls suggested that more than two out of three people disapproved of Thatcher's
decision to accede to the U.S. request.[126]

Despite the Lebanon hostage crisis in in April 1986, the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 in
September 1986, and the Lockerbie bombing in December 1988, Thatcher insisted that the
raid had deterred further Libyan attacks.[127]

Supplementary Extradition Treaty

Thatcher also contended that her support for the U.S. bombing of Libya imposed an
obligation on the United States to ratify a new extradition treaty with the United Kingdom in
order to stand up to IRA violence. "What is the point," she asked, "of the United States taking
a foremost part against terrorism and then not being as strict as they can against Irish
terrorism, which afflicts one of their allies?"[128] The U.S.-U.K. Supplementary Extradition
Treaty, restricting the application of the political offence exception, signed in June 1986, and
coming into force in December, was "hailed as a major improvement in the efforts of
democratic nations to fight international terrorism".[129]

Westland affair

Thatcher's preference for defence ties with the United States was also demonstrated in the
Westland affair of 1986 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 management's preferred option, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation of the
United States. Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, who had pushed the Agusta deal,
resigned in protest after this, and remained an influential critic and potential leadership
challenger.

South Africa

In July 1986 Thatcher expressed her belief that economic sanctions against South Africa
would be immoral because they would make thousands of black workers unemployed.[130]
Public dissatisfaction with her position grew steadily, reaching 65% in a MORI poll for The
Times published in August 1986, following a boycott of the Commonwealth Games in
Edinburgh by 32 nations. However just 49% of people surveyed said they would approve of
an end to new investment by British companies, and a complete ban on trade, air or sporting
links also failed to attract majority support. 46% said sanctions would not help bring an end
to apartheid, while 44% said they would.[131]

Local government devolution

In 1986, in a controversial move, the Thatcher government abolished the Greater London
Council, then led by the left-wing Ken Livingstone, as well as six Labour controlled
metropolitan county councils.[132] The government stated that they ordered this to decrease
bureaucracy and increase efficiency, and encouraged transferring power to local councils for
increased electoral accountability.[132] Thatcher's opponents, however, held that the move was
politically motivated, as the GLC had become a powerful centre of opposition to her
government, and the county councils were in favour of higher local government taxes and
public spending.
Relationship with the Queen

As Prime Minister, Thatcher met weekly with Queen Elizabeth II to discuss government
business.[133] She was just six months older than the Queen, and their relationship came under
close scrutiny,[134] with the media speculating that they did not get along overly well.[135]
While they displayed public images that largely contrasted,[136] Tim Bell, a former Thatcher
advisor, recalled, "Margaret has the deepest respect for the Queen and all her family".[137] She
was said to greet the Queen with a curtsey every time they met.[137]

In July 1986 sensational claims attributed to the Queen's advisers of a "rift" between
Buckingham Palace and Downing Street "over a wide range of domestic and international
issues" were reported by The Sunday Times.[138][139] The immediate cause was said to be "the
Queen's fear for the possible break-up of the Commonwealth" because of Thatcher's rejection
of comprehensive sanctions against South Africa.[131][138] Their relationship was characterised
as "pragmatic and without any personal antagonism".[138] The Palace issued an official denial,
heading off speculation about a possible constitutional crisis.[139] However a MORI poll for
the Evening Standard suggested a sharp loss of support for the government following the
controversy, giving Labour a 6-point lead, reversing a previous Conservative 6-point lead,
while a separate MORI poll for The Times put Labour on 41% with a 9-point lead.[131]

After Thatcher's retirement a senior Palace source again dismissed as "nonsense" the
"stereotyped idea" that she had not got along with the Queen or that they had fallen out over
Thatcherite policies.[140] Thatcher herself declared that "stories of clashes between 'two
powerful women' were too good not to make up ... I always found the Queen's attitude
towards the work of the Government absolutely correct" [141]

1987 election

At the time of the 1987 general election, Labour leader Neil Kinnock presided over a party
deeply divided on policy agendas.[142] Margaret Thatcher, in turn, led her party to victory,
winning an unprecedented third term[143] with a 102 seat majority,[144] and became the longest
continuously serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since Lord Liverpool (1812 to
1827), as well as the only Prime Minister of the 20th century to serve three terms.[67] She was
elected riding on an economic boom against a weak Labour opposition. The Conservatives
won 42.2% of the popular vote, while the Labour party won 30.8% and Alliance won
22.6 %.[144]

Third government (1987–1990)

Environmental issues

Thatcher, the former chemist, became publicly concerned with environmental issues in the
late 1980s. In 1988, she made a major speech communicating the problems of global
warming, ozone depletion and acid rain.[145]

Continuation of economic changes

Thatcher introduced a new system for the government to raise revenue; she replaced local
government taxes with a Community Charge or "Poll tax", in which property tax rates were
made uniform, in that the same amount was charged to every individual resident, and the
residential property tax was replaced with a head tax whose rate would be established by
local governments.[146] Thatcher's revolutionary system was introduced in Scotland in 1989
and in England and Wales the following year.[67]

The Thatchers with the Reagans standing at the North Portico of the White House prior to a
state dinner, 16 November 1988

A sceptical British public was disenchanted with Thatcher's system of local taxation[146] and it
was to be among the most unpopular policies of her premiership. What the Thatcher
government did not anticipate was that local councils would raise their total shares from the
taxes.[146] As a result, the central Government capped rates that seemed out of line, resulting
in charges of partisanship and the alienation of small-government Conservatives.[146] The
Prime Minister's popularity declined in 1989 as she continued to refuse to compromise on the
tax.[67] Unrest mounted and culminated in a number of riots, the most serious of which
occurred at Trafalgar Square, London, on 31 March 1990; more than 100,000 protesters
attended and more than 400 people were arrested.[147]

A BBC Radio poll in September 1989 indicated that almost three-quarters of the public were
also against water privatisation.[148] Despite public opposition to the poll tax and the
privatisation of water, electricity, and British Rail, Thatcher remained confident that, as with
her other major reforms, the initial public opposition would turn into support after
implementation. A MORI poll for the Sunday Times in June 1988 found that more than 60%
of voters agreed that in the long term the Thatcher government's policies would improve the
state of the economy, while less than 30% disagreed; although income inequality had
increased the poor were still better off than in 1979: 74% of Britons said they were satisfied
with their present standard of living, while only 18% were dissatisfied.[149]

Europe

At Bruges, Belgium, in 1988, Thatcher made a speech in which she outlined her opposition to
proposals from the European Community, a forerunner to the European Union, for a federal
structure and increasing centralisation of decision-making.[150] Though she had supported
British membership in the EC, Thatcher believed that the role of the organisation should be
limited to ensuring free trade and effective competition, and feared that the EC approach to
governing was at odds with her views of smaller government and deregulatory trends;[151] in
1988, she remarked, "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".[151] A split was emerging over European policy
inside the British Government and her Conservative Party.[7]

On 30 November 1988, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain's
detention provisions were in breach of European law, the policy split extended to parliament
with the presentation of a petition calling for a written British constitution. Thatcher reacted
angrily to the ECHR ruling, and to the failure of Belgium and Ireland to extradite a suspected
terrorist, Father Patrick Ryan, to face charges in Britain. She told the Commons: "We shall
consider the judgment carefully and also the human rights of the victims and potential victims
of terrorism."[152]

At a meeting before the Madrid European Community summit in June 1989, Chancellor of
the Exchequer Nigel Lawson and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe sought to persuade
Thatcher to agree to circumstances under which Great Britain would join the Exchange Rate
Mechanism, a preparation for monetary union, and abolish the pound as British currency. At
the meeting, they both said they would resign if their demands were not met.[153] Thatcher, as
well as her economic advisor Alan Walters, was opposed to this notion and felt that the
pound sterling should be able to float freely,[154] and that membership would constrain the
UK economy.[155] Both Lawson and Howe eventually resigned[154] and Thatcher remained
firmly opposed to British membership in the European Monetary System.[155]

1989 Leadership election

Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by virtually unknown
backbench MP Sir Anthony Meyer in the 1989 leadership election.[156] Of the 374
Conservative MPs eligible to vote, 314 voted for Thatcher while 33 voted for Meyer; there
were 27 abstentions.[156] Thatcher noted, "I would like to say how very pleased I am with this
result and how very pleased I am to have had the overwhelming support of my colleagues in
the House and the people from the party in the country", while Meyer said he was delighted
as well: "The total result I think is rather better than I had expected".[156] Her supporters in the
Party viewed the results as a success, and rejected suggestions that there was discontent
within the Party.[156]

Gulf War

Thatcher reviews Bermudian troops, 12 April 1990

Main article: Gulf War

Thatcher was visiting the United States when she received word that Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein had invaded neighbouring Kuwait.[157] She met with US President George H. W.
Bush, who had succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1989, during which Bush asked her, "Margaret,
what is your view?" She recalled in an interview that she felt "that aggressors must be
stopped, not only stopped, but they must be thrown out. An aggressor cannot gain from his
aggression. He must be thrown out and really, by that time in my mind, I thought we ought to
throw him out so decisively that he could never think of doing it again."[157] She put pressure
on Bush to deploy troops to the Middle East to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.[158] Bush
was somewhat apprehensive about the plan, so Thatcher remarked to him during a telephone
conversation, "This was no time to go wobbly!"[159] Thatcher's government provided military
forces to the international coalition in the Gulf War to pursue the ouster of Iraq from
Kuwait.[160]

Resignation

See also: Conservative Party (UK) leadership election, 1990

Despite having the longest continuous period of office of any prime minister in the twentieth
century, Thatcher had, on average during her premiership, the second-lowest approval rating
of any post-war prime minister, at 40%, only beating Edward Heath; even after the Falklands
War it had never risen above 55%; polls consistently showed that she was less popular than
the Conservative party.[161] A self-described conviction politician, Thatcher always insisted
she did not care about her poll ratings, pointing instead to her unbeaten election record.[162]

Moreover, in relative terms, Thatcher's personal position had remained consistently strong: a
Marplan poll for the Sunday Express in October 1988 showed that Thatcher was still trusted
by 61% of Britons to lead the country, compared with only 17% for Labour leader Neil
Kinnock. Thatcher's capacity to lead was trusted by 87% of Conservative voters and 46% of
Labour voters.[163] A Telephone Surveys poll for the Sunday Express in September 1990,
during the Gulf crisis, found that 65% of voters preferred Thatcher as a crisis leader to
Kinnock, who polled 20%.[164]

A Mori poll for the Sunday Times in September 1989 showed that Thatcher was still the
public's preferred choice of Conservative leader, attracting the support of 32% of voters, her
pro-European former cabinet colleague Michael Heseltine coming second on 22%.[165]
However, by March 1990, in the face of rising inflation and the threat of a recession and
inevitable mass unemployment, Thatcher's support had halved to 15%, with Heseltine's
doubling to 40%.[165] Opposition to the poll tax[166] and the divisions opening in the
parliamentary party over European integration[67] left Thatcher increasingly vulnerable to a
challenge.[167]

By November 1990 the Conservatives had been trailing Labour for 18 months.[161] Although
a Mori survey for the Sunday Times showed that 83% of Conservative voters were satisfied
by the way Thatcher represented the United Kingdom in Europe,[168] a BBC poll found that
Labour had increased its lead by 5 points to 14%, its biggest lead since May, while a poll for
the Evening Standard found that Labour had nearly doubled its lead over the Conservatives to
13.2 points.[169] Low poll ratings, along with Thatcher's combative personality and
willingness to override colleagues' opinions, contributed to discontent in the parliamentary
party.[170]

On 1 November 1990, Geoffrey Howe, for 15 years one of Thatcher's most "loyal and self-
effacing" supporters, resigned from his position as Deputy Prime Minister over her refusal to
agree to a timetable for British membership of the single currency.[169][171] In his resignation
speech in the Commons on 13 November, referring to Thatcher's promise to veto any
arrangement which jeopardised the pound sterling, Howe famously complained: "It is rather
like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find the moment that the
first balls are bowled that their bats have been broken before the game by the team
captain."[172] Howe's resignation put Thatcher's future in doubt,[173][169] and was afterwards
recognised as dealing a "fatal blow" to her premiership.[174] While 59% of the British public
polled for The Independent by Number Market Research agreed with Thatcher's opposition to
monetary union, 64% still felt she ought to retire.[175]

A few days later Heseltine challenged her for the leadership of the party. A Gallup poll for
the Daily Telegraph showed that 28% of voters would be more inclined to vote Conservative
if Heseltine were leader, and only 7% would be less inclined. Five separate polls indicated
that he would give the Conservatives a national lead over Labour.[165] Heseltine attracted
sufficient support from the parliamentary party in the first round of voting to prolong the
contest to a second ballot.[7] Although Thatcher initially stated that she intended to contest the
second ballot,[7] she consulted with her Cabinet and decided to withdraw from the contest.[2]
Thatcher said that pressure from her colleagues helped her to conclude that the unity of the
Conservative Party and the prospect of victory in the next general election would be more
likely if she resigned.[176] Early on the morning of 22 November, the 65-year-old Prime
Minister announced to the Cabinet that she would not be a candidate in the second ballot.[170]
Thatcher informed the Queen of her decision, and a statement was released from 10 Downing
Street at 09.34:[170]

The Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Margaret Thatcher, F.R.S., has informed the Queen that she does not
intend to contest the second ballot of the election for leadership of the Conservative Party and intends
to resign as Prime Minister as soon as a new leader of the Conservative Party has been
elected… "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."[170]

Some sections of the British public were stunned,[170] but there were also scenes of rejoicing
at the news.[177] After visiting the Queen at Buckingham Palace, she later arrived at the House
of Commons to a debate; Neil Kinnock, Leader of the Opposition, proposed a motion of no
confidence in the government, and Thatcher displayed her combativeness.[170] She said:

Eleven years ago we rescued Britain from the parlous state to which socialism had brought it. Once
again Britain stands tall in the councils of Europe and of the world. Over the last decade, we have
given power back to the people on an unprecedented scale. We have given back control to people over
their own lives and over their livelihoods, over the decisions that matter most to them and their
families. We have done it by curbing the monopoly power of trade unions to control, even victimize
the individual worker.[170]

Later years
Mrs Thatcher retained her parliamentary seat in the House of Commons as MP for Finchley
for two years despite returning to the backbenches after leaving the premiership. She
supported John Major as her successor and he duly won the leadership contest, although in
the years to come her approval of Major would fall away.[178] She occasionally spoke in the
House of Commons after she was Prime Minister, commenting and campaigning on issues
regarding her beliefs and concerns.[67] In 1991, she was given a five minute, unprecedented
standing ovation at the party's annual conference.[179] She retired from the House at the 1992
election, at the age of 66 years; she said that leaving the Commons would allow her more
freedom to speak her mind.[180]

After Parliament

Margaret Thatcher became a peer in House of Lords in 1992 by the bestowal of a life peerage
as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire.[180][181] Thatcher had
already been honoured by the Queen in 1990, shortly after her resignation as Prime Minister,
when awarded the Order of Merit, one of the UK's highest distinctions and in the personal
conferment of the sovereign.[182] At the same time it was announced that her husband, Denis,
would be given a baronetcy, which was confirmed in 1991[182][183] (ensuring that their son,
Mark, would inherit a title). In 1995, Baroness Thatcher was appointed a Lady Companion of
the Order of the Garter, the United Kingdom's highest order of Chivalry.[184]

After leaving the House of Commons, Thatcher remained active in politics. She wrote two
volumes of memoirs: The Downing Street Years, published in 1993 and The Path to Power
published in 1995. A third book followed these, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World,
detailing her thoughts on international relations since her resignation in 1990.

In August 1992 Thatcher called for NATO to stop the Serbian assault on Goražde and
Sarajevo in order to end ethnic cleansing and to preserve the Bosnian state. She described the
situation in Bosnia as "reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Nazis," warning that there
could be a "holocaust" in Bosnia and described the conflict as a "killing field the like of
which I thought we would never see in Europe again."[185] She made a series of speeches in
the Lords criticising the Maastricht Treaty,[180] describing it as "a treaty too far" and stated "I
could never have signed this treaty".[186] She cited A. V. Dicey, to the effect that, since all
three main parties were in favour of revisiting the treaty, the people should have their say.[187]

Thatcher at state funeral of Ronald Reagan, June 2004

Thatcher (right) with Mikhail Gorbachev (left) and Brian Mulroney (centre) at the funeral
service of Ronald Reagan, June 2004
From 1993 to 2000, Lady Thatcher served as Chancellor of the College of William and Mary
in Virginia, which, established by Royal Charter in 1693, is the sole royal foundation in the
contiguous United States. She was also Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, the
UK's only private university.

After Tony Blair's election as Labour Party leader in 1994, 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."[188]

Lady Thatcher visited former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, once a key British ally
during the 1982 Falklands War, while he was under house arrest in Surrey in 1998. Pinochet
was fighting extradition to Spain for alleged human rights abuses committed during his
tenure.[189] Thatcher expressed her support and friendship for Pinochet,[189] who had swept to
power on a wave of military violence and torture in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, thanking
him for his support in 1982 and for "bringing democracy to Chile."[189]

In 1999, during Thatcher's first speech to a Conservative Party conference in nine years, she
contended that Britain's problems came from continental Europe.[190] Her comments aroused
some criticism from Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Foreign Secretary under Sir John Major,
who said that Lady Thatcher's comments could give the impression that Britain is prejudiced
against Europe.[190]

In the 2001 general election, Lady Thatcher supported the Conservative general election
campaign but this time did not endorse Iain Duncan Smith in public as she had done
previously for John Major and William Hague. In the Conservative leadership election
shortly after, she supported Iain Duncan Smith because she believed he would "make
infinitely the better leader" than Kenneth Clarke.[191]

Activities since 2003

Thatcher was widowed upon the death of Sir Denis Thatcher on 26 June 2003. A funeral
service was held honouring him at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea on 3 July with Thatcher
present, as well as her children Mark and Carol.[192] Thatcher paid tribute to him by saying,
"Being Prime Minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be—you cannot lead from a
crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone. What a man. What a husband. What a
friend".[193]

Now in her declining years, she began complaining about her "lost" family, (Mark in South
Africa, Carol in Switzerland), but her daughter was less than sympathetic; "A mother cannot
reasonably expect her grown-up children to boomerang back, gushing cosiness and make up
for lost time. Absentee Mum, then Gran in overdrive is not an equation that balances."[194]

The following year, on 11 June, Thatcher travelled to the United States to attend the state
funeral service for former US President Ronald Reagan and one of her closest friends at the
National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.[195] Thatcher delivered a eulogy via videotape to
Reagan; in view of her failing mental faculties following several small strokes, the message
had been pre-recorded several months earlier.[196] Thatcher then flew to California with the
Reagan entourage, and attended the memorial service and interment ceremony for President
Reagan at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.[197]
Thatcher attends the official Washington, D.C. memorial service marking the 5th anniversary
of the 11 September attacks, pictured with Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney
and his wife Lynne Cheney.

Thatcher talks with then-United States Secretary of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, 12 September 2006

Thatcher marked her 80th birthday with a celebration at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hyde
Park, London on 13 October 2005, where the guests included the Queen, The Duke of
Edinburgh, Princess Alexandra and Tony Blair.[198] There, Geoffrey Howe, now Lord Howe
of Aberavon, said of his former boss, "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."[199]

In 2006, Thatcher attended the official Washington, D.C. memorial service to commemorate
the fifth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. She attended as a
guest of the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, and met with US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice during her visit.[200] On 12 November, she appeared at the Remembrance
Day parade at the Cenotaph in London, leaning heavily on the arm of Sir John Major. On 10
December she announced she was "deeply saddened" by the death of Augusto Pinochet.[201]

In February 2007, she became the first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to be honoured
with a statue in the Houses of Parliament while still living. The statue is made of bronze and
stands opposite her political hero and predecessor, Sir Winston Churchill.[202] The statue was
unveiled on 21 February 2007 with Lady Thatcher in attendance; she made a rare and brief
speech in the members' lobby of the House of Commons, reposting, "I might have preferred
iron — but bronze will do... It won't rust."[202][203] The statue shows her as if she were
addressing the House of Commons, with her right arm outstretched. Thatcher said she was
thrilled with it.[204]

On 13 September 2007, Thatcher was invited to 10 Downing Street to have tea with Prime
Minister Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah. Brown referred to Lady Thatcher as a
"conviction politician." [205]
On 30 January 2008, Thatcher met incumbent Conservative Leader David Cameron at an
awards ceremony at London's Guildhall where she was presented with a 'Lifetime
Achievement Award'.[206]

In May 2009, she traveled to Rome to meet Pope Benedict XVI in a private audience at the
Vatican. She had previously met Paul VI in 1977 and John Paul II in 1980.[207]

Lady Thatcher was invited back to Number 10 in late November 2009 to be at the unveiling
of an official portrait by the artist, Richard Stone, who had previously painted The Queen and
the late Queen Mother. Lady Thatcher was invited along with guests including the current
Conservative Leader, David Cameron, as well as former members of Lady Thatcher's Cabinet
and members of the Conservative-supporting newspapers throughout the 1980s including the
Chief Political Commentator of The Telegraph, Benedict Brogan, and former Sun editor,
Kelvin MacKenzie.[208]

It is a rare honour for a living Prime Minister to have a commissioned painted portrait
hanging in the Prime Minister's residence: all other living prime ministers having
photographs only that line the stair walls of Number 10. Baroness Thatcher and only two
other Prime Ministers have their portraits painted as well as a hung photograph on display.
Sir Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George are the only other Prime Ministers to have
hung painted portraits on display in Number 10 Downing Street.[209]

Health

Thatcher suffered several small strokes in 2002 and she was advised by her doctors not to
engage in any more public speaking.[210] As a result of the strokes, her short term memory
began to falter.[211] Her former press spokesman Sir Bernard Ingham said in early 2007,
"She's now got no short-term memory left, which is absolutely tragic."[212]

Thatcher was admitted to St Thomas' Hospital, Central London on 7 March 2008, for tests
after collapsing at a House of Lords dinner.[211] She was taken by ambulance to the hospital,
where she spent one night.[211] The incident was probably caused by her low blood pressure
and stuffy conditions within the dining hall.[211][213]

On 24 August 2008 it was publicly disclosed that Thatcher has been suffering from dementia.
Her daughter Carol described in her 2008 memoir, A Swim-on Part in the Goldfish Bowl, first
observing in 2000 that Thatcher was becoming forgetful.[214] The condition later became
more noticeable; at times, Thatcher thought that her husband Denis, who died in 2003, was
still living.[215] Carol Thatcher recalls that her mother's memories of the time she spent as
Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990 remain among her sharpest.[214]

In June 2009 Thatcher broke a bone in her arm in a fall at home.[216] She underwent a 45
minute surgical procedure to insert a pin into her upper arm.[217] She spent a total of three
weeks in hospital before being discharged.[218]

On 13 November 2009, rumours of Thatcher's death were erroneously circulated within the
Canadian Government whilst they attended a black-tie dinner, after transport minister John
Baird sent a text message announcing the death of his pet tabby called Thatcher. However,
the news was reported to prime minister Stephen Harper as the death of Baroness Thatcher,
and almost caused a diplomatic incident between Canada and the United Kingdom, but the
Canadian Government rang Downing Street and Buckingham Palace to seek verification.[219]

Legacy
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Thatcher remains identified with her remarks to the reporter Douglas Keay, for Woman's
Own magazine, 23 September 1987:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to
understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will
go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are
casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual
men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and
people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after
our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind
without the obligations...[220]

To her supporters, Margaret Thatcher remains a revolutionary figure who revitalised Britain's
economy, impacted the trade unions, and re-established the nation as a world power.[221] But
Thatcher was also a controversial figure, in that her premiership was also marked by high
unemployment and social unrest,[221] and many critics fault her economic policies for the
unemployment level.[222] Yet speaking in Scotland in April 2009, before the 30th anniversary
of her election as prime minister, Thatcher declared: "I regret nothing," and insisted she "was
right to introduce the poll tax and to close loss-making industries to end the country's
'dependency culture'."[223] Critics, however, have regretted her influence in the abandonment
of full employment, poverty reduction and a consensual civility as bedrock policy objectives.
The tone of many recent biographers has been 'that of a policeman examining a nasty crime
scene' and Michael White writing in The New Statesman in February 2009 wondered if the '
hubristic collapse of the free-market model of capitalism that she promoted [had] dealt her
another blow. Who was it who first removed the seat belts and airbags from the safe-but-
boring Volvo that the West built after 1945? 'Her freer, more promiscuous version of
capitalism' in Hugo Young's phrase is reaping a darker harvest." [224]

The Labour party, in adapting its social democratic agenda, incorporated much of the
economic, social and political tenets of Thatcherism.[225] Thatcher's programme of privatising
state-owned enterprises has not been reversed.[226] Indeed, successive Conservative and
Labour governments have further curtailed direct state management of the economy and have
further dismantled public ownership.[225] Yet Thatcher's growth model, as it promoted
privatisation of public assets and deregulation of the private sector, particularly the financial
sector, its encouragement of the financial sector to 'create new ways of spreading risk and
expanding credit' has, since 2008, looked less definitive. The financial revolution in London
in the 1980s meant that among the large economies none rivalled Britain for the relative size
of its financial sector. Whether the events of 2008-2009, "the collapse of a particular growth
model and ideology, the discrediting of many of the prescriptions of neo-liberalism, and the
dramatic return of the state, in the form of bank bailouts and nationalizations - constitute a
permanent and major political and ideological shift, or whether the changes will only prove to
be temporary" - is still to be seen.[227] In his 2009 TV series 'Off Kilter', looking at Scotland,
the cultural commentator Jonathan Meades spoke of Thatchers legacy in Fife: "Fife's mining
towns and villages were victims, collateral as they say, of that bloody spat of 25 years ago ; -
mining might, just might, have been economically exhausted, but it was socially cohesive; its
undeniable that jobs do foment pride, they inculcate an idea of self worth. Finchley was quite
incapable of empathy. There is much to be said in favour of inefficient industry , not least
that that the human cost of efficiency and adherence to the bottom line does not have to be
paid, - nor for that matter does unemployment benefit have to be paid to the tens of thousands
rationalised into involuntary idleness. Further, the Finchley faith, which became the
enthusiastically adopted cross party consensus of the past 25 years, the faith that
manufacturing industry was an irrelevance, and that an entire economy, a soufflé economy,
might be founded on the no-holds-barred selflessness of deregulated debt rights, peddling
expensive money, proved to be just that, a faith, an expression of unfounded wishfulness."
[228]

After her resignation in 1990, a MORI poll found that 52% of Britons agreed that "On
balance she had been good for the country", while 48% disagreed.[229] In April 2008, the
Daily Telegraph commissioned a YouGov poll asking whom Britons regarded as the greatest
post-World War II prime minister; Thatcher came in first, receiving 34% of the vote, while
Winston Churchill ranked second with 15%.[230][231][232]

Recently, proponents of the "end of capitalism" thesis[233] have speculated tentatively about
"the death of Thatcherism,"[234] linking the 1986 deregulation of the financial industry to the
2008 world financial crisis.[235][236] The link is rejected by others, The Economists opinion
column Bagehot for example, argued that: "There have been too many intervening years,
factors and governments for the case to stand up—though it reflects Mrs Thatcher's mythic
status that, for some, she must be to blame".[237]

Conversely, Conservative leaders sense in the crisis "the death of New Labour".[238]
Thatcher's defenders argue that the current downturn is dwarfed by the wealth generated by
decades of growth, and note that the banking crisis began under the divided, tripartite
regulatory system introduced by Gordon Brown in 1997.[239] Others, the conservative Claire
Berlinski for example, point to Thatcher's control of the money supply and cite the 1986
Financial Services Act as evidence of her own emphasis on "stringent banking
regulation",[240] and contend that the big-spending Labour government only lasted as long as
it did "because it inherited the best economic situation of any 20th-century government".[235]
English author and academic Andrew Gamble has written that these arguments are evidence
that neo-liberal apologists "are already seeking to develop their own narrative of the crash
and what caused it, arguing that the crisis has been caused by failures of regulation rather
than failures of markets. Neo-liberals hope by this means to seize back the ground they have
lost. But, like Keynesianism in the 1970s, neo-liberalism has suffered some hammer blows."
[241]
Gamble further adds, "The 'efficient markets thesis', the belief that markets if left alone
would always price assets correctly, is in ruins." [241]

Thatcher herself made known in April 2009 that she was "appalled" by Brown's handling of
the economy, seeing it as "a repeat" of the crisis of the 1970s that had brought her radical
reforming government to power.[242] Pointing to the "huge convergence around liberal labour
markets, liberal migration policies and high levels of public spending," one leading analyst
summed up the new policy paradigm as: "Thatcher plus Keynes".[238]

Honours

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

In addition to her conventional appointment as a Member of Her Majesty's Most Honourable

Privy Council (PC) upon becoming Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1970[243]
Thatcher has received numerous honours as a result of her career, including being named a
Lady of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (LG). She is a Member of the Order of Merit
(OM) as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and the first woman entitled to full
membership rights as an honorary member of the Carlton Club, a gentlemen's club.
US President George Bush awards Thatcher the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1991

In 1999 Thatcher was among 18 included in Gallup's List of Widely Admired People of the
20th century, from a poll conducted of Americans. In a 2006 list compiled by New Statesman,
she was voted 5th in the list of "Heroes of our time".[244] She was also named a "Hero of
Freedom" by the libertarian magazine Reason.[245] In the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher
Day is celebrated as a public holiday every 10 January, commemorating her visit on this date
in 1983, seven months after the military victory;[246][247] the decision was taken by the
Falklands Islands legislature in 1992.[248] Thatcher Drive in Stanley, the site of government, is
also named for her. In South Georgia, Thatcher Peninsula, where the Task Force troops first
set foot on Falklands soil, also bears her name.[249][250]

Upon her death, it has been suggested that Lady Thatcher be granted the rare honour of a
state funeral.[251] However, Harriet Harman has revealed that the current Labour government
is undecided on the issue.[252]

Thatcher has also been awarded numerous honours from foreign countries. In 1990, she was
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour awarded by the
United States. She was also given the Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom, Ronald
Reagan Freedom Award, and named a patron of the Heritage Foundation.[253] She was also
awarded the Grand Order of King Dmitar Zvonimir, the fourth highest state order of the
Republic of Croatia.

Cultural depictions

Cultural depictions of Margaret Thatcher have featured in a number of television programs,

documentaries, films and plays; among the most notable depictions of her are Patricia Hodge
in The Falklands Play (2002) and Lindsay Duncan in Margaret (2009). She was also the
inspiration for a number of protest songs.[254][255][256][257][258] The most famous depiction of
Thatcher was, and remains, a Spitting Image puppet, voiced by Steve Nallon.

What We Can Learn from Margaret Thatcher

by Sir Rhodes Boyson and Antonio Martino

Heritage Lecture #650

 POLITICAL LESSONS
Sir Rhodes Boyson

Margaret Thatcher has her place in world as well as British history. Her very name is used to

denote a way of thinking: Thatcherism. She herself was not an original thinker, and on her

resignation the editor of the Daily Telegraph described Thatcherism as a powerful collection of

beliefs about the capacities of human beings in a political society. The ideas were not new but

were put into operation by a very remarkable woman. It was the happy coincidence of the right
person, in the right place, at the right time.

When she became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, Britain was on the brink of disaster,

threatened by total collapse. The weak Labour government with a small majority presided over a

bankrupt economy in hock to the IMF and threatened from within by a challenge to law and order

itself. When she was forced from power in 1990, she left a sound economy and a confident and
well-ordered society. The lessons are writ large.

The achievement was remarkable, starting with the fact of being the only woman Prime Minister in

British history--something America has yet to emulate. She enjoyed 11 and a half years in office,

longer than any other 20th century politician (in fact, the longest since Lord Liverpool in the 19th

century). She won three successive general elections, two of them being landslide majorities, and

lost none. The secret of her success lies in a combination of qualities, which both saw her into
leadership and were the essence of her period in power:

 Courage to see an opportunity and take it.

 Decisiveness in times of crisis.

 Clear beliefs held with an evangelical zeal. During the 1979 election, she ridiculed the Socialist

Prime Minister Callaghan saying, "The Old Testament prophets did not say `Brothers, I want a

consensus.' They said, `This is my faith; this is what I passionately believe; if you believe it too,

then come with me.'" Her crusading qualities were embedded in her Methodist background,

which gave a moral purpose to all she did.

 Physical strength. She needed little sleep and would certainly have been killed by the IRA

bomb in Brighton if she had not been working on her conference speech at 2:00 a.m.

 Intellectual capacity. She entered Oxford at 17 reading chemistry.

She was a slight, pretty, feminine woman in a man's world. She turned what could have been a
disadvantage into a useful weapon, and she had luck.

Domestic Policy

Monetarism underpinned all Margaret Thatcher's policies. The beliefs were clear and are still what

a free country needs to prosper. The aims were clear: to reduce the power of government, to

reduce taxation and thereby promote private enterprise and individual rights, to give incentives to

businessmen and encourage competition. Margaret Thatcher believed that these aims would

produce economic and fiscal benefits for the people and enable her to use the political process to
further the free society in all its aspects.

The economic lessons of these beliefs are going to be dealt with by Antonio Martino. In this he is

fortunate, for monetarism and the free market are what most excited Margaret Thatcher. Suffice

for me to say that what Thatcher pledged in her manifestos was delivered. She used simple

imagery that everyone could understand. She was the grocer's daughter, the housekeeper of the
nation who would balance the budget and the nation would only spend what it could afford.

It was only after 1987 when Chancellor Lawson shadowed the deutsche mark and Britain entered

the ERM that the Conservatives learnt you cannot buck the market. The price was failure in 1997.

But it is important to remember that at no point did the public lose faith in the free market which

Margaret Thatcher did so much to encourage. The opposition have adopted this policy, and the last

election was fought partly on the basis of who could best implement that policy--a key part of
Thatcher's legacy.

The monetary reforms of Margaret Thatcher were paralleled by moves to curb the power of the

trade unions in Britain. Just as the Conservative Party already had taken up free market ideas in

its manifesto for the 1970 election, so the intention to work with the trade unions was not entirely

new. The Labour Party under Harold Wilson had introduced legislation "in place of strife," and
when it failed, the floodgates of intransigence were opened.

Callaghan (himself a trade unionist) had tried to build a social contract between the Labour

government and the trade unions. When consensus patently failed, in the winter of discontent of

1979, it left the field open for Margaret Thatcher. The time was ripe, but she made the difference.

She had a will of iron and stood firm against a barrage of strikes and intimidation, until between

1982 and 1988 the unions were brought step by step within the law. After the final confrontation

with the steel and coal industries, the proper balance between employer and workforce was

restored. Men no longer had to join a trade union, and this, combined with the program of
privatizing nationalized industries, resulted in a reduction of union membership from 13 million in
1979 to 8 million in 1996.

The defeat of the trade unions, together with privatization, represented one of Margaret Thatcher's

greatest successes. The effect was to bring large sections of the working class within the

Conservative fold. She had extended to them what had been regarded as middle-class ideals and

had, through privatization, created popular capitalism and the beginnings of a shareholding
democracy.

When Margaret Thatcher took office, there were 3 million private shareholders; when she left,

there were almost 11 and a half million. The tabloid newspapers latched onto this and joined their

broadsheet cousins in publishing alongside the racing columns share market information and news.

The popularity of privatization increased as each industry was floated on the stock exchange.
When the gas industry was launched, the shares were oversubscribed by 500 percent.

Working people were given a further stake in society by the sale of locally subsidized housing, in

which many of them lived. They were sold to tenants at knockdown prices, and between 1979 and

1989 owner occupation increased from 55 to 63 percent. Despite the setback of the recession of
the early 1990s, the ambition of most of the electorate remained to own their own home.

As Margaret Thatcher drew the wider electorate into her beliefs, it should be remembered that she

had originally had to fight all the way within her own party. Unlike an American President, who

takes with him his whole machine, Margaret Thatcher was an outsider who inherited a Cabinet and

party machine, both of which were consensual in attitude. This applied even more so to the civil
service, which for 15 of the previous 19 years had been under socialist direction.

She used similar tactics to turn round all three to her way of thinking. She bypassed them until

she had the members she wanted. She used subcommittees instead of full Cabinet to ensure her

policies. She used outside think tanks: the Institute of Economic Affairs, which had given her the

early tutelage in monetarism, and the Centre for Policy Studies, founded by her guru, Sir Keith

Joseph. Like Heritage in America, they created the intellectual ideas for she and her followers to

implement. She brought in outside advisers: academics like Alan Walters and Terry Burns and

successful businessmen like Sir John Hoskins (computer magnate), Derek Rayner (M&S), and Sir
Robin Ibbs.

The need to cut bureaucracy and public spending was tackled from the outset, and between 1979

and 1987 the number of civil servants was reduced by 22.5 percent (732,000 to 567,000). The

truly radical changes were introduced between 1987 to 1990, inspired by Sir Robin Ibbs. Only a

small core of advisers was to be retained to run government machinery, and most civil servants
would work for new executive agencies, attached to ministries. Precise targets were to be set and
held to. Although the reforms were properly effected after Margaret Thatcher had left office, she
had changed the culture of the machinery of government.

It was more difficult to bring about cost cutting and reform in local government and the welfare

services of health, social security, and education. The welfare needs were seen by the electorate

as free and of right. It is difficult to take a bone away from a dog, and the early years of her
premiership were taken up by more pressing matters.

Cost-cutting measures were undertaken in all the services, but despite cash limits being imposed,

overall spending rose. (For example, in health, from 1980 to 1987 it increased by 60 percent). In

education, my voucher scheme was turned down by

Cabinet, and only minor changes were introduced.

In local government, cost cutting had perverse repercussions. The spendthrift city authorities
controlled by the extreme left were rate-capped and the worst of them all, the Greater London

Council, abolished. Unfortunately, it allowed Councillors to blame government for shortfall in

services and increased centralized control, which reduced freedom.

Margaret Thatcher's populist instinct had made her more cautious in these areas, but after the

election success of 1987, when she saw her monetary policies threatened by runaway costs, she

introduced dramatic reform in all these areas. Again they were not properly implemented until she
had been forced from office.

The changes that had been undertaken were to prove part of her undoing. The poll tax, which was

an individual tax which replaced a property tax, was so unpopular it had to be withdrawn. The

health and social security changes frightened the electorate and led to the debacle of 1997. In

education, the setting up of grant-maintained schools to bring power and responsibility to

individual schools as against the local authority was overturned by the present government.

There is a lesson in all this: Always tackle the controversial or unpopular measures at the

beginning of an administration. Margaret Thatcher thought she was doing this after her great

election success in 1987. She could not have foreseen she would have been forced out of office in

three years. It was not that the ideas were wrong; the think tanks had provided mechanisms to

introduce market principles. In these areas, however, only a few politicians had been willing to
preach their virtues. Their time is yet to come, the message must still be reiterated.

Foreign Policy

Few politicians in history have the opportunity or ability to shine in domestic and foreign policy.
Margaret did both. She was patriotic and had no compunction in unfurling that flag. Her patriotism
was instinctive and struck a chord with the British people. They saw her as a powerful leader who
stood up for Britain.

She didn't pretend to be a diplomatist, and actually said of herself, "I know nothing about

diplomacy, but I just know and believe I want certain things for Britain." These were increased

respect for Britain as a leading power, limitations on European pretensions, and a close alliance
with the U.S.

This latter was the most important and productive, and was cemented by the mutual attraction

and meeting of minds of President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on most issues. It enabled her

to fight a war 8,000 miles away in the Falklands. She had the backing of the British people, but

she needed American help. It was given, and she never forgot this. Neither did she forget

European procrastination and obstructiveness. Later, she was to use her prestige to nudge
President Bush into the Gulf War.

Britain remained America's strongest ally. She stood with America against terrorism in the Libyan

crisis. Most important, she stood with President Reagan on the Strategic Defense Initiative but

ensured that what was good for America did not undermine NATO, nor undermine the nuclear

deterrent necessary for the rest of the West. It proved to be the final piece in the jigsaw that saw

the end of the Evil Empire and the collapse of Russian Communism. The Iron Lady had played her
part, and the chemistry that had worked with Reagan similarly worked with Gorbachev.

The repercussions of the changes that were pursued by the action of these three people were

immense. The world was made a different place. As Margaret Thatcher herself said after leaving

office, "The US and Britain have together been the greatest alliance in the defence of liberty and
justice that the world has ever known."

Margaret Thatcher's part in the fall of Russian Communism bridged her American and European

policies. She wanted the Eastern European countries free and absorbed into the European

Community. This would dilute French and German dominance of Europe and make more likely a

community of independent national states. From 1980 to 1988, she visited Eastern Europe as

often as she could--Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Russia, and Poland. She was popular and was seen

as the champion of the values they wanted--national determination, liberty, and the free market.
She raised British prestige and gave the people of Eastern Europe hope.

The European Community

Her dealings with the European Community were a different matter. There was no meeting of
minds with her European partners. The protectionist, bureaucratic structure was contrary to British

tradition. The Foreign Office and the majority of her Cabinets were pro-Europe and believed in
consensus. Margaret Thatcher didn't, and in British interests managed to have the Common

Agricultural Budget reduced and in 1980 handbagged the Commission into agreeing to a rebate for
our contributions.

The price she paid was high. The economic recession in the late 1980s persuaded her into the

single market. She saw it as beneficial for commerce and the extension of free trade. Her
continental partners saw it not only as economic but political: the move to a single European state.

All three parties and the British public have moved their stance on Europe since 1970, when we

first joined the Community. The present Conservative position of wanting to keep Sterling and

against political integration fits the mood of the majority of the British people. The party should

shout this loudly from the rooftops. It is a potential election winner. Europe however, was

Margaret Thatcher's nemesis. Perhaps it is fitting she was in Paris when her fate as Prime Minister
was sealed.

A Remarkable Legacy

Margaret Thatcher was a conviction politician and left a remarkable legacy. Beware Mr. Blair:

There is no third way. He has benefited from the sound economy he inherited. He also has the

precious legacy of an electorate well-versed in monetarism during the 18 years of Conservative

government. He has pledged to continue the fiscal policies for two years. They are now up, and the
pressure is mounting within factions of his party for him to spend.

Significantly, the crude banners of a pressure group demonstrating outside the Labour Party

conference last week read: "Stuff the market, tax the rich." His continuation of the privatization

policy is compromised by government private partnership. His rhetoric to keep the trade unions at

arm's length is already undermined by his actions. Privileges have already been introduced via the
back door of the socialist-led European Community laws.

We should all remember that the three most successful Conservative leaders who won three

successive elections were Lord Liverpool (early 19th century), Lord Salisbury (late 19th century),

and Margaret Thatcher. They were all right-wing. They did not seek the center. When Margaret

Thatcher was given the Winston Churchill Award by the U.S., the citation read: "Like Churchill she

is known for her courage, conviction, determination and willpower. Like Churchill she thrives on
adversity." They were both loved and hated but left their mark.

-- Sir Rhodes Boyson was one of the architects of the Thatcherite Revolution and served in several

senior posts in the Thatcher government. He delivered these remarks at a meeting of The Heritage
Foundation's Windsor Society in Sea Island, Georgia, on October 3-6, 1999.
ECONOMIC LESSONS
Antonio Martino

What role did leadership play in making the last two decades of this century so radically different

from the first eight decades? I shall argue that Margaret Thatcher's and Ronald Reagan's

leadership has translated the revolution in economic thinking into actual policy changes.1 Also, by

bringing those ideas out of the ivory tower and into the political arena, they have contributed in

shifting the focus of political debate in a direction more favorable to a free society. If today's

political discourse is so radically different from what it has been for the greatest part of this

century, this is certainly due to the intellectual giants that have prepared the revolution--

Friedman, Hayek, Buchanan, Stigler, to name just a few--but also to a great extent to two world

leaders--Reagan and Thatcher--who have allowed those ideas to be implemented and, by so

doing, to be known to the masses.

An Epochal Change

It is gratifying to look back at the political climate which has prevailed for most of this century and

compare it to the present one. The century that is coming to its end has been the century of the

State, a century of dictators, the century of Hitler and Stalin, as well as the century of arbitrary

government and of unprecedented intrusion of politics into our daily lives. It has produced the

largest increase in the size of government in the history of mankind.2 Just to mention a single, but

very significant, indicator: In 1900, the ratio of government spending to GDP in Italy was 10

percent; in the 1950s, 30 percent; and it is now roughly 60 percent. Similar considerations apply
to most countries.

For the greatest part of the 20th century, the prevailing intellectual climate has been in favor of

socialism in one form or another. The future of freedom, of a society based on voluntary

cooperation, free markets, and the rule of law, appeared uncertain, to say the least.3 Many people

had become convinced of the "inevitability of Socialism."4 There is no need to insist on this point.
We all remember how gloomy the political scenario was for freedom fighters until recently.

In the course of the 1970s, things started to change.5 Gradually, pessimism subsided and a new

mood started to take hold. More and more people were expressing dissatisfaction with the old

socialist prescriptions and indicating a preference for market mechanisms. Socialists of the old

school became fewer and fewer. As a result, believers in a free society began to hope for the
future of a liberal order.

A notable precursor of the change and a conspicuous exception to the then prevailing climate of
pessimism was Arthur Seldon, co-founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. In a letter

to The Times on August 6, 1980, he went as far as to predict: "China will go capitalist. Soviet
Russia will not survive the century. Labour as we know it will never rule again. Socialism is an

irrelevance." At that time, this view was regarded as preposterous, an eccentric example of English
witticism. Ten years later, it seemed prophetic if not obvious.

What brought about this radical change? Why has political rhetoric, and at times even actual
policy, changed so much?

The Role of Ideas 6

The epochal change in public policy began as an intellectual revolution. This is not as obvious as it

sounds. On the practical importance of their ideas, economists disagree. As is well-known, Keynes

was very sanguine: "the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right

and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is

ruled by little else."7 Alfred Marshall, his economics teacher, on the other hand, was convinced that
economists should preach unpopular truths:

Students of social sciences must fear popular approval, evil is with them when all men speak well

of them.... It is almost impossible for a student to be a true patriot and to have the reputation of
being one at the same time.8

This was also Hayek's view, when he stressed that the economist "must not look for public

approval or sympathy for his efforts"9 Finally, George J. Stigler was convinced that the practical

relevance of the economics profession's intellectual output was minimal: "economists are subject
to the coercion of the ruling ideologies of their times."10

I tend to disagree with Stigler on this point.11 There is no doubt in my mind that "the Great U-

turn" of our times has been initiated by a legendary revolution in economic thinking. From the

perspective of the ideological confrontation, I am convinced that--thanks to the work of the great

liberal scholars of this century--we live in one of the happiest times in the contemporary history of

mankind. It seems to me that never before has the case for freedom been more thoroughly

analyzed and better understood. Also, more people are aware of the importance of freedom on a
theoretical level today than at any other time in the past 50 or 100 years.12

The "British Disease"

In the 1970s, Britain's economy was in a sorry state: Many people were regularly referring to the

"British disease." This was not an exaggeration: "during the nineteenth century and the first three

fifths of the twentieth century the United Kingdom remained ahead [in terms of output per head]

of nearly all the main European countries."13 "Since 1960, however, an absolute gap
emerged...[and] by 1973 most European Economic Community countries were 30 to 40 per cent
ahead of Britain."14

Productivity was much lower than in continental Europe: According to studies by international

corporations, at the end of the 1970s net output per head was over 50 percent higher in German

and French plants than in corresponding plants in the United Kingdom.15 To top this all, Britain

experienced rampant inflation--from 1972 to 1977, while the OECD price level rose by 60 percent,

the British level rose by 120 percent--and high unemployment--by 1977, the British
unemployment rate was 7 percent, or 2.5 percent above the OECD average.

This appalling record seemed paradoxical to the late Mancur Olson: "Britain has had more giants of

economic thought than any other country," and "[m]ost of the great early economists, and

certainly men like David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, were classical liberals." Their work had a

definite impact on British public opinion: "classical liberalism was more popular in 19th-century

Britain than...in most countries of continental Europe." And yet, "Britain has suffered from the

`British disease' of slow growth." He concluded: "[W]e need something besides the level of
economic understanding to explain economic performance."16

It seems to me that Olson makes a mistake in lumping together the British economic thinkers of

the 18th and 19th centuries with those of the 20th. First of all, while it is hard to dispute British

supremacy in economic thought in the 18th and 19th centuries, I very much doubt that the same

can be said of British economists in the 20th century. There have been notable exceptions, no

doubt, but it seems to me that, compared to the previous centuries, the 20th century has been
one of mediocrity as far as British economic thinkers are concerned.

Nor am I impressed by John Maynard Keynes--whom Olson quotes as evidence that British

supremacy in economic theory continued in the 20th century--because his influence, in my view,

has been disastrous. Britain and the world would have definitely been better off had Keynes
devoted his tremendous intellectual powers to some other subject.

Finally, the majority of the economics profession in Britain after Keynes' death in 1946 has been

notable for its mediocrity and its contempt for the free market: Let's not forget the manifesto of

364 British economists against Mrs. Thatcher's policies. Contrary to what Olson thought, the

"British disease" was another example of the power of ideas, of wrong ideas: The anti-capitalistic

consensus among British economists has undoubtedly contributed to Britain's decline.17 In

particular, let us see why Britain's stagflation in the 1970s and her relative economic decline did
not take place despite the influence of John Maynard Keynes, but because of it.

Keynesianism

Following Keynes' teaching, British economists were convinced that inflation was the unavoidable
price of economic growth and a cure for unemployment.18 They also believed that it was possible

to reduce interest rates through monetary expansion and that the economy could be "fine tuned"

in the short term, thus avoiding the ups and downs of the economic cycle. Furthermore, inflation

was not considered a monetary phenomenon but the result of excessive increases in wages due to

what Samuel Brittan calls "union pushfulness," so that in order to combat inflation, one had to

resort to wage and price controls, and come to terms with the unions, while at the same time
pursuing expansionary monetary and fiscal policies to stimulate demand.

All of this sounds absurd today, and it certainly is, but it was the general Keynesian consensus at

that time, shared by the Labour Party and to some extent also by the Tories. Everybody seemed to

agree to the same Keynesian concoction: easy money, high taxation, deficit spending, and wage
and price controls (incomes policy, as it was called in England).

Needless to add, all of these views have succumbed to the empirical evidence and the theoretical

analyses of the last 30 years. The heroes of the counter-revolution are the great liberal thinkers I

mentioned before: Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, etc. We now know that there is no evidence

that economic growth inevitably involves price inflation.19 The idea that one can reduce

unemployment through inflation is thoroughly discredited. Only an accelerating inflation could keep
unemployment below its "natural rate," but even that unappetizing possibility is dubious.20

Finally, as for the desirability of wage and price controls, we now know that the remedy was not

only ineffective but also positively harmful.21 A side effect of these policies was that of making the

problem of the excessive power of labor unions much worse. Britain in the 1970s confirmed the

wisdom of Henry Simons who, in a famous 1944 article,22 had denounced the danger of labor
unions:

Labor monopolies...once established...enjoy an access to violence which is unparalleled in other

monopolies.... Unions may deal with scabs in ways which make even Rockefeller's early methods
seem polite and legitimate. They have little to fear...from Congress or the courts.23

It may be argued that Simons, writing in the U.S. in the 1940s, was slightly too pessimistic. His

analysis, however, describes perfectly the U.K. of the 1970s. Keynesianism had convinced the

overwhelming majority of politicians of both parties that there was no alternative to a policy aimed

at appeasing the unions, while at the same time following an expansionary demand policy, through

easy money and budget deficits. Wrong ideas resulted in stagflation--slow growth, unemployment,
and inflation--and a rapid growth of the size of government.

Ideas and Interests: The Case of Britain

To put it bluntly, by the 1970s Britain was a basket case. Many economists agree that the
excessive power of labor unions was responsible for the sorry state of Britain's economy.24 For
example, according to Samuel Brittan:

[M]any of the particular perversities of British economic policy stem from the belief that inflation

must be fought by regulation of specific pay settlements. To create a climate in which the unions

will tolerate such intervention has been the object of much government activity. This has involved

price controls, high marginal tax rates, and a special sensitivity to union leaders' views on many

aspects of policy. The post-1972 period of especially perverse intervention began, not with a

change of government, but with the conversion of the Heath Conservative government to pay and
price controls.25

Brittan is referring to the disastrous economic policies uniformly pursued by Conservative and

Labour governments in Britain during the 1970s.26 In particular, the Conservative government to

which Brittan is referring started with admirable intentions. In the Conservative manifesto for the
1970 election, one reads:

[W]e reject the detailed intervention of socialism, which usurps the function of management, and

seeks to dictate prices and earnings in industry.... Our aim is to identify and remove obstacles that
prevent effective competition and restrict initiative.27

These admirable intentions were not followed by equally commendable policies. In fact,

[T]he Conservative government of 1970-74 was the most corporatist of the post-war years. Its

economic policies ended in disaster and the Conservative party lost two elections in succession.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Heath lost the leadership of the party....28

According to Brittan, the excessive power of organized labor also influenced the tax code, with
devastating consequences:

For most of the postwar period the real trouble has been...not average tax rates but the very high

marginal rates of tax, both at the top and at the bottom of the income scale. The top marginal

rates are not only higher than in other industrial countries, but reached at a much lower level of

income. These are entirely political taxes. The revenue collected at the top is trivial in statistical

terms; and the real effect is certainly to lower revenue.... As important...is the diversion of scarce

energy and talent into trying to convert income into capital, or into benefits in kind not taxable at
these rates.29

Thatcher

This was the background of the advent of Mrs. Thatcher. Wrong economic theories, entrenched
interest groups, and a widespread aversion for the free market had resulted in economic sclerosis,
inflation, unemployment, and general decline. She intended to change all of this, and she did.

Her first battle was in the field of macroeconomic policy, where there was a switch from reliance

on fiscal policy as a means of managing aggregate demand to the use of monetary policy. In fiscal

policy the aim was that of reducing the deficit (PSBR: Public Sector Borrowing Requirement). In

the field of taxation, the goal was that of restoring incentives to work, save, and invest through

cuts in all tax rates, especially at the highest levels. The underlying philosophy was that the
restoration of incentives was more important than the search for equality.

But where she really excelled was in macroeconomic or supply side reforms:

[A]fter the inflation-fighting campaign of 1979-82, [she engaged in] non-stop reform of the supply

side--union laws, privatisation, deregulation, local government finance reform, housing, radical tax
reform and much else.30

Thatcher also succeeded in taming the unions. Even her detractors concede that that was one of
her great successes, one which she shares with President Reagan:

[Reagan and Thatcher] did make considerable progress in shrinking the role of government, and in

expanding the reach of market forces in the microeconomy. Both did so, first, by taming the trade

union power.... The President successfully broke a strike by air traffic controllers in 1981.... The

Prime Minister equally successfully broke a strike in 1984-85 by coal miners determined to impose
their leader's political agenda on an electorate that had rejected it.31

She also succeeded in shrinking government's direct role in the economy through privatization. It

is generally recognized that "Thatcherism's success in converting state-owned to privately-owned

enterprises...[was] a programme so radical in conception, and so successful in operation, as to

have won the highest form of flattery from other nations--imitation."32 Contrary to what people

both on the right and on the left maintain, Mrs. Thatcher's successes do not include a reduction in

total public spending: "Indeed, 18 years of Tory government left the state's overall share of the
economy virtually undiminished: 44% of GDP in 1979 and 43% in 1996."33

To sum up, Thatcher succeeded in drastically reducing inflation in a country that had become

dependent on it; taming the power of what were probably the most powerful labor unions in

Europe; privatizing a large portion of a bloated public sector; enacting a tax code more favorable

to entrepreneurship and investment; and establishing the conditions for long-term economic
growth.

She put an end to the "British disease." She put Britain back to work. Last, but definitely not least,
she shifted the focus of political debate on economic issues. Mr. Blair's economic program would

have been considered Conservative in the 1970s. If Labour has been forced to drastically alter its

position, this is largely due to Mrs. Thatcher's legacy. One can criticize some details, but overall
hers has been a fantastic success.34

How Did She Do It?

How did she do it? I believe there are several factors that contributed to Thatcher's "Conservative
Revolution."

Ideas. There is no doubt that Thatcher's success is largely due to the power of ideas. She

acknowledged the important role played by the Institute of Economic Affairs in providing the

intellectual ammunition and the inspiration for her program. On the occasion of the 30th
anniversary of the IEA, she said:

[T]he Institute began at a time when despite free speech in a free country, there prevailed what I

would call a censorship of fashion. Anyone who dared to challenge the conventional wisdom of the

post-war years was frowned-upon, criticized, derided and pilloried as being reactionary or

ignorant.... You set out to change public sentiment.... May I say how thankful we are to those

academics, some of whom were very lonely, and to those journalists who joined your great

endeavour. I do not think they ever numbered 364. They were the few. But they were right, and
they saved Britain.35

Without those ideas, Thatcher's revolution would have been impossible. However, let's not forget

that most of them were already available 10 years earlier at the time of the Heath government. It

can be argued that in 1979 the justification for a radical change in economic policy was stronger

than ever before, but it is still true that ideas alone do not explain the revolution. They were a
necessary, but certainly not a sufficient, cause for the change.

Circumstances. It is true that by the end of the 1970s, the evidence of the failure of the statist

policies pursued by both Labour and Tory governments was overwhelming. I believe that

circumstances did play a role in Thatcher's success. However, the evidence of the failure of those

anti-market policies was already in existence in 1970, even though it was not as conspicuous as in
1979.

Furthermore, let's not forget that not everybody drew the same conclusions from that experience.

Certainly not the Labour Party that in 1979 was as Socialist as ever. And, as far as academic

economists are concerned, the vast majority was convinced that there was no need for a change in
policy, as revealed by the 364 of them who signed a manifesto against the new policies of the

Thatcher government. The evidence was undoubtedly there, and it helped Thatcher's cause, but it
had been there before with no impact, and many educated people still failed to draw the correct
conclusions from it.

Interests. The trade unions had abused their power, and this made the case for reducing their

influence stronger than ever. However, even this was not new: The danger omnipotent labor
unions pose to a free society had been obvious for years, yet nobody had ever tried to tame them.

Leadership. I believe that, while these factors played a role in Thatcher's success, the crucial

element was her personality, her principled and uncompromising leadership. It can be said of her
what Ted Kennedy said of Reagan:

It would be foolish to deny that his success was fundamentally rooted in a command of public

ideas. Ronald Reagan may have forgotten names, but never his goals. He was a great

communicator, not simply because of his personality or his teleprompter, but mostly because he
had something to communicate.36

She dared do what no one else had had the courage to do in Britain for decades: challenge the

prevailing consensus, the common wisdom, the entrenched interests, and drive a reluctant party
and a befuddled country in a radically new direction.

I can testify to her unusual personality. I have had the chance to meet her several times even

before I entered politics. Once, in 1991, there was a conference in Fiesole, near Florence,

organized by the National Review Institute. During a coffee break, we were walking along the

portico of the hotel. Tuscany's countryside looked magnificent under the afternoon sun. Mrs.

Thatcher remarked: "Yours is a beautiful country, with a rotten government." To which I replied:
"My dear lady, the opposite would be much worse."

Her straightforward, direct way of putting things, so unusual for a political leader, earned her some

enemies among other leaders but made for a refreshing contrast with the hypocrisy and vacuity of

the accepted political discourse. At times, she probably overdid it. For example, on that same

occasion in Fiesole, during her summing-up of the conference, she came out with the statement:

"Civilization is the exclusive prerogative of English-speaking peoples." I was the only non-English,

non-American in the room. I looked at John O'Sullivan, who was sitting next to me. He smiled and
said, "You have been consigned to barbarism!"

She can also be very kind and thoughtful. When we won the elections in Italy in 1994, she sent me

a fax of congratulations. I called her to thank her for her kindness. She gave me her usual pep

talk: "You must do for Italy what I did for Britain." I attempted to explain that we were at a
disadvantage compared to her. I said: "You had a Constitution that was written in the hearts and
the minds of your people. We don't. You had an independent judiciary. We don't. You had a clean

and effective civil service. We don't. You had a single party majority. We don't. You had those
think tanks, like the IEA, that provided you with the right ideas. We don't."

"However," I added, "we have something which you didn't have." "What's that?" she said. "Your
example," I replied.

As to the relative importance of ideas and/or leadership, she gave her own view on the occasion of

the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the IEA. After having listened to a series of speeches by

distinguished academics, all praising the great importance of ideas, she thus concluded her

remarks: "Speaking as the eleventh speaker and the only woman, I hope you will recall that it may
be the cock that crows but it is the hen who lays the eggs."

What Can We Learn from Thatcher?

The lesson to be drawn is quite simple and not particularly encouraging: Mrs. Thatcher's success

owes much to the intellectual revolution in economic theory. She did not invent anything new;

there was nothing novel or original in her economic policies. However, while those ideas had been

available for a long time, they had not been translated into policy changes until she came about. It

was her leadership, courage, determination, and intellectual integrity that allowed those
intellectual insights to inspire actual economic policies and change Britain.

Which brings me to my unpleasant conclusion: The limiting factor in politics today is not the

comprehension of the nature of social problems and of their desirable solution--even though we

still have a long way to go to make the case for economic freedom fully grasped by the majority of

public opinion and of politicians. The really scarce resource is leadership. A principled and

uncompromising leader capable of building a coalition, a majority consensus around his platform is

essential if we want to move toward a freer world

Margaret Thatcher applauded by her cabinet after her final speech to the Party Conference.
Brighton, 1984.
Margaret Thatcher applauded by her cabinet after her final speech to the Party Conference.
Brighton, 1984.