Margaret Thatcher (born October 13, 1925,Grantham,Lincolnshire, England—died April 8, 2013, London) was a BritishConservative Party politician andprime minister (1979–90),Europe’s first woman prime minister. The onlyBritish prime minister in the 20th century to win three consecutive terms and, at the time of her resignation,Britain’s longest continuously serving prime minister since 1827, she accelerated the evolution of the British economy from statism toliberalism and became, by personality as much as achievement, the most renowned British political leader sinceWinston Churchill. She was a role model for a later prime minister,Liz Truss.

Early years

The daughter of Alfred Roberts, a grocer and localalderman (and later mayor of Grantham), and Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, Thatcher formed an early desire to be a politician. Herintellectual ability led her to theUniversity of Oxford, where she studiedchemistry and was immediately active in politics, becoming one of the first woman presidents of the Oxford UniversityConservative Association. After graduating in 1947 she worked for four years as a research chemist, reading for the bar in her spare time. From 1954 she practiced as abarrister, specializing intax law. In 1951 she married a wealthy industrialist, Denis Thatcher (b. 1915—d. 2003), who supported her political ambition. The couple had twins, a son and a daughter, in 1953.

Thatcher first ran for Parliament in 1950 but was unsuccessful, despite increasing the local Conservative vote by 50 percent. In 1959 she entered theHouse of Commons, winning the “safe” Conservative seat of Finchley in northern London. She rose steadily within the party, serving as a parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance (1961–64), as chief opposition spokesman on education (1969–70), and as secretary of state for education andscience (1970–74) in the Conservative government ofEdward Heath. While a member of the Heath cabinet (Thatcher was only the second woman to hold a cabinet portfolio in a Conservative government), she eliminated a program that provided free milk to schoolchildren, provoking a storm of controversy and prompting opponents in the Labour Party to taunt her with cries of “Thatcher the milk snatcher.” She also created morecomprehensive schools—introduced by the Labour Party in the 1960s to make rigorous academic education available to working-class children—than any other education minister in history, though they were undermined during hertenure as prime minister. After Heath lost two successive elections in 1974, Thatcher, though low in the partyhierarchy, was the only minister prepared to challenge him for the party leadership. With the backing of the Conservative right wing, she was elected leader in February 1975 and thus began a 15-year ascendancy that would change the face of Britain.

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Prime minister

Thatcher led theConservatives to a decisive electoral victory in 1979 following a series of major strikes during the previous winter (the so-called “Winter of Discontent”) under theLabour Party government ofJames Callaghan. As a prime minister representing the newly energetic right wing of the Conservative Party (the “Dries,” as they later called themselves, as opposed to the old-style moderate Tories, or “Wets”), Thatcher advocated greater independence of the individual from the state; an end to allegedly excessive government interference in the economy, includingprivatization of state-owned enterprises and the sale ofpublic housing to tenants; reductions in expenditures on social services such as health care, education, and housing; limitations on the printing of money in accord with the economic doctrine ofmonetarism; and legal restrictions on trade unions. The termThatcherism came to refer not just to these policies but also to certain aspects of herethical outlook and personal style, includingmoral absolutism, fiercenationalism, azealous regard for the interests of the individual, and a combative, uncompromising approach to achieving political goals.

The main impact of her first term was economic. Inheriting a weak economy, she reduced or eliminated some governmental regulations and subsidies to businesses, thereby purging the manufacturing industry of many inefficient—but also some blameless—firms. The result was a dramatic increase in unemployment, from 1.3 million in 1979 to more than double that figure two years later. At the same time, inflation doubled in just 14 months, to more than 20 percent, and manufacturing output fell sharply. Although inflation decreased and output rose before the end of her first term, unemployment continued to increase, reaching more than three million in 1986.

Thatcherembarked on an ambitious program of privatization of state-owned industries and public services, including aerospace, television and radio, gas and electricity, water, the state airline, andBritish Steel. By the end of the 1980s, the number of individual stockholders had tripled, and the government had sold 1.5 million publicly owned housing units to their tenants.

Nonetheless, rising unemployment and social tensions during her first term made her deeply unpopular. Her unpopularity would have ensured her defeat in the general election of 1983 were it not for two factors: theFalkland Islands War (1982) between Britain and Argentina, over possession of a remote British dependency in the South Atlantic, and the deep divisions within the Labour Party, which contested the election on a radicalmanifesto that critics dubbed the “longest suicide note in history.” Thatcher won election to a second term in a landslide—the biggest victory since Labour’s great success in 1945—gaining a parliamentary majority of 144 with just over 42 percent of the vote.

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Thatcher entered office promising to curb the power of the unions, which had shown their ability to bring thecountry to a standstill during six weeks of strikes in the winter of 1978–79. Her government enacted a series of measures designed to undermine the unions’ ability to organize and stage strikes, including laws that banned theclosed shop, required unions to poll their members before ordering a strike, forbade sympathy strikes, and rendered unions responsible for damages caused by their members. In 1984 the National Union of Mineworkers began a nationwide strike to prevent the closing of 20 coal mines that the government claimed were unproductive. The walkout, which lasted nearly a year, soon became emblematic of the struggle for power between the Conservative government and thetrade union movement. Thatcher steadfastly refused to meet the union’s demands, and in the end she won; the miners returned to work without winning a singleconcession.

A terrorist bombing at a Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1984, the work of theIrish Republican Army, nearly killed Thatcher and several senior members of her government. After battlingKen Livingstone’s Labour-led London government, Thatcher abolished theGreater London Council in 1986. By the end of Thatcher’s second term, few aspects of British life had escaped the most sweeping transformation of Britain since the postwar reforms of the Labour Party.

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In foreign affairs, the Falklands Warilluminated her most significant international relationship, withRonald Reagan, president of theUnited States (1981–89). Thatcher and Reagan, who together made the 1980s the decade ofconservatism, shared a vision of the world in which theSoviet Union was an evil enemy deserving of no compromise, and their partnership ensured that theCold War continued in all its frigidity until the rise to power of the reform-minded Soviet leaderMikhail Gorbachev in 1985. In keeping with her strong anticommunism—a 1976 speech condemningcommunism earned her the nickname “Iron Lady” in the Soviet press—Thatcher strongly supported theNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, a stance that proved popular with the electorate, given the Labour Party’s repudiation of Britain’s traditional nuclear and defense policies. In Africa, Thatcher presided over the orderly establishment of an independent Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) in 1980 after 15 years of illegal separation from British colonial rule under a white minority. However, she encountered considerablecriticism both at home and abroad for her opposition to international sanctions against theapartheid regime ofSouth Africa.

The second half of Thatcher’s tenure was marked by an inextinguishable controversy over Britain’s relationship with theEuropean Community (EC). In 1984 she succeeded, amid fierce opposition, in drastically reducing Britain’s contribution to the EC budget. After her third electoral victory in 1987, she adopted a steadily more hostile attitude toward Europeanintegration. She resisted “federalist” continental trends toward both a single currency and a deeper political union. Her traditionally pro-European party became divided, and a string of senior ministers left the Cabinet over the issue.

The implementation of apoll tax in 1989 produced outbreaks of street violence and alarmed the Conservative rank-and-file, who feared that Thatcher could not lead the party to a fourth consecutive term.Spurred by public disapproval of the poll tax and Thatcher’s increasingly strident tone, Conservative members of Parliament moved against her in November 1990. Although she defeated her most senior opponent, former defense minister Michael Heseltine, by 204 votes to Heseltine’s 152, her total fell four votes short of the necessary majority plus 15 percent, and she decided not to contest the election in a second ballot. On November 22 she announced her resignation as Conservative Party leader and prime minister, paving the way for her replacement byJohn Major six days later.

Later years

In retirement, Margaret Thatcher remained a political force. She continued to influence internal Conservative Party politics (often to the dismay of Major), and Thatcherism shaped the priorities of the Labour Party, which she had kept out of office for more than a decade. She remained a member of Parliament until the 1992 election and was subsequently elevated, as a peeress for life, to theHouse of Lords. She continued to speak and lecture, notably in the United States and Asia, and established theThatcher Foundation to support freeenterprise anddemocracy, particularly in the newly liberated countries of central and eastern Europe. In 1995 she became a member of theOrder of the Garter.

Following a series of minor strokes, she retired from public speaking in 2002. Thatcher’s daughter, Carol, revealed in her 2008 memoirA Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl that her mother had been showing symptoms of progressivedementia since 2000.