The most conspicuous personality at last week’s Conservative conference in Manchester wasn’t even there. Margaret Thatcher, who would have been 100 today, was a dominant, ghostly presence.
A giant “Maggie Mosaic” of polaroid pictures greeted the party faithful, invoking their lost leader who died more than a decade ago.
And life-size cardboard Margaret Thatcher cutouts, plus her most famous outfits from eleven years in office, piled on the nostalgia.
There was even a cyber-Thatcher, a chilling chatbot saying: “If the party wishes to recover it must do more than mention my name. It must live up to it.”
Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch, reading the many biographies of her illustrious predecessor, likens her unsteady start as leader to Mrs T saying she, too, was “written off” to begin with. But her legacy is something to build on – not hide behind, warned the Thatcher-bot.
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It is a remarkable legacy, the most substantial since her hero Winston Churchill. From relatively humble beginnings in the Lincolnshire market town of Grantham, she built a formidable reputation as the first female UK premier and international stateswoman.
And it was a long story. A Cambridge-educated chemist, she practised as a tax lawyer before becoming MP for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath, later her most bitter critic, made her Education Secretary in his 1970 government, where she won the nickname “Milk Snatcher” after abolishing free milk in primary schools.
She was elected Conservative leader in 1975, and cruised into Downing Street in 1979 following the so-called “Winter of Discontent” when much of Britain was strikebound. On the steps of Number Ten, she took on the mantle of St Francis of Assisi, uttering the prayer: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.”
She went to rule in the opposite manner, sowing division and unhappiness that culminated in poll tax riots on the streets of London. Even the Queen, with whom her relations were sometimes less than cordial, found her policies “uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive” according to the monarch’s press secretary.
Her reign in Number Ten, the longest of any PM since 1827, was marked by radical upheaval: abandonment of the post-war social consensus of a mixed economy and growth of the welfare state. There was no such thing as Wilsonism, or Heathism, but there was Thatcherism: a philosophy elevating the individual over the collective – she hated trade unions – and demanded a smaller state.
She privatised major state-owned industries, including gas, water and electricity, and deregulated financial markets, prompting an economic boom. It was not a recipe for the adulation in which she is now held by nostalgic Tories, and she quickly became unpopular as the economy faltered and unemployment surged.
Rescue came from the unlikely quarter of Argentina, whose military dictator General Galtieri foolishly invaded the Falkland Islands. Thatcher’s swift retaking of the colony gave her a landslide election win in 1983, and victory abroad went to her head at home.
After surviving the IRA Brighton hotel bomb assassination bid in 1984, she defeated the National Union of Mineworkers in a year-long strike that decimated the industry. And after an easy win over Neil Kinnock in 1987, she imposed the hated poll tax on every household in the kingdom.
Internationally, she fared better. A close friend and ally of Republican US president Ronald Reagan, she was instrumental in ending the long-running Cold War with the Soviet Union. Famously, she “could do business” with reformist USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev, though the Russians dubbed her “the Iron Lady.”
There was too much iron around for her fellow Tories. Her intense dislike of the European Union, made her the real Mother of Brexit. But her strident “No! No! No!” attitude in the Commons triggered a subversive speech from her own Foreign Secretary, the mild-mannered Sir Geoffrey Howe, that triggered her demise.
She had faced down General Galtieri, Arthur Scargill and Gerry Adams and IRA hunger strikers, but she couldn’t face down MPs fearful of losing their seats. Ousted by her own party, she bid a tearful farewell to Number Ten in 1990, and retired from Parliament two years later, becoming Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. Her Thatcher Foundation was set up to continue spreading the word, as the Tony Blair Foundation does for him today.
Mrs T died suddenly, aged 87, in her suite in the Ritz Hotel, London, on 8 April 2013, following a stroke. She had been suffering from dementia and had not been seen in public for some years. Her death was greeted with simultaneous grief and joy. Tory premier David Cameron flew home from a trip to Europe, and arrangements were made for a ceremonial – but not state, as with her hero Churchill – funeral, with military honours in St Paul’s Cathedral.
Parliament was recalled, and tributes poured in from across the political spectrum and the world. But in some of the mining villages, decimated by her crushing defeat of the NUM, leading to privatisation and closure of the industry, there was celebration.
In the Brookside social club of South Elmsall, Yorkshire, the song “The Witch is Dead!” was played at top volume endlessly. I was there. The deep-seated animosity was genuine. And in nearby Goldthorpe, she was burned in effigy. This was Labour’s traditional heartland, but it was a different story at the top of the party. Leader Tony Blair said: “Margaret Thatcher was a towering political figure. Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world.
“Margaret was such a leader. Her global impact was vast. And some of the changes she made in Britain were, in certain respects at least, retained by the 1997 Labour government, and came to be implemented by governments around the world.”
And it is true that privatisation, the cult of the individual over the collective, the suppression of trade union power and the free-market economy of unrestrained capitalism, have dominated political thinking and practice in many countries since she left office.
As the first woman party leader and Prime Minister, she was also in a position to advance the cause of women. President Barack Obama said her premiership was “an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.”
That is arguable. Thatcher was no women’s libber, and only appointed one woman to her Cabinet during her long premiership – and she was a peer, not an MP. Indeed, in 1970, she had remarked: “There will never be a woman prime minister in my lifetime – the male population is too prejudiced.”
In her time, there was never any question of “women only shortlists” to close the gender gap on the Tory benches in the Commons, as there was with Labour. She condemned “the permissive society.” She was, famously, married for fifty years to golf-playing, Tory hard-liner Denis Thatcher, an oil company executive, and had two children, twins Carol and Mark, born in 1953.
Carol became a journalist, while Mark became a businessman of sorts, later attracting bad publicity over arms contracts. One of the few times that Mrs T wept was when Mark got lost in the desert on a car rally.
While she was an enthusiastic anti-communist, Thatcher’s international record on human rights bears little scrutiny. She gave tacit support to apartheid in South Africa and condemned Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. At home, her instincts on race relations led her to give qualified backing to Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech on Commonwealth immigration, saying he had “made a valid argument, if in somewhat regrettable terms.”
A statue of Grantham’s most famous daughter in full ceremonial robes stands out of reach on a ten-foot-high plinth in the town centre. When it was put up in 2022, eggs were thrown, and it has since been vandalised with red paint. Another statue intended for Westminster was decapitated while on loan to a London art gallery. She was finally immortalised in bronze in the Members’ Lobby in 2007.
“I would have preferred iron, but bronze will do,” she sniffed. “It won’t rust.” Nor does her memory. Kemi Badenoch shows few signs of becoming the second Thatcher. But then, neither did the first until she got into power. That’s in the nature of the job, and the aspirants to it. She who would be Mrs T, will be, if she gets the chance.
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