Latest update February 6th, 2025 7:27 AM
“Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher dead at 87
(Reuters) – Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” who transformed Britain and inspired conservatives around the world by radically rolling back the state during her 11 years in power, died yesterday following a stroke. She was 87.
Britain’s only woman prime minister, the unyielding, outspoken Thatcher led her party to three election victories, governing from 1979 to 1990, the longest continuous term in office for a British premier in over 150 years.
Former British prime minister and Conservative party leader Baroness Margaret Thatcher.
A grocer’s daughter with a steely resolve, she was loved and loathed in equal measure as she crushed trade unions, privatized vast swathes of British industry, clashed with allies in the European economic bloc and fought a distant and improbable war to recover the Falkland Islands from Argentinian invaders.
She struck up a close relationship with U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the Cold War, backed the first President George Bush during the 1991 Gulf War, and declared that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a man she could “do business with”.
“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,” said Tony Blair, whose term as Labour prime minister from 1997-2007 he acknowledged owed a debt to the former leader of his Conservative opponents.
“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,” said Blair.
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron cut short a visit to Europe to return to Britain after the death was announced and British flags on government buildings and royal palaces across London were lowered to half mast.
President Barack Obama led an outpouring of tributes from the United States: “America has lost a true friend,” he said.
Mourners laid roses, tulips and lilies on the doorstep of her house in Belgravia, one of London’s most exclusive areas. One note said: “The greatest British leader” while another said to “The Iron Lady”, a soubriquet bestowed by a Soviet army newspaper in the 1970s and which Thatcher loved.
But, in a mark of lingering anger at a woman who explained her belief in private endeavor by declaring “there is no such thing as society”, someone also left a bottle of milk; to many Britons, for scrapping free milk for schoolchildren as education minister in 1971, she remained “Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”.
The former premier died peacefully yesterday morning at the Ritz Hotel after a stroke. Having retreated into seclusion after being deposed by her party, the death of her businessman husband Denis in 2003 and creeping dementia had kept her out of the public eye for years. She had been in poor health for months.
Lord Bell, a spokesman for the family, likened her to her hero Winston Churchill – a comparison echoed on the recaptured Falkland Islands – while Cameron said she would go down as Britain’s greatest peacetime prime minister.
“We’ve lost a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton,” Cameron said. “The real thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country.”
The government said Thatcher would have a ceremonial funeral with military honours at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, which falls short of a full state funeral, in accordance with the wishes of her family.
The abiding domestic images of her premiership will remain those of conflict: huge police confrontations with mass ranks of coalminers whose year-long strike failed to save their pits and communities; Thatcher riding a tank in a white headscarf; and flames rising above Trafalgar Square in the riots over the deeply unpopular “poll tax” which contributed to her downfall.
“I found her to be confrontational, dogmatic, abrasive, she attacked people in her own country and didn’t listen to people in her own party,” recalled Caspar Joseph, 51, a history teacher in Manchester. “She was destructive, nihilistic.
“I will be raising a glass. I have some 1992 Dom Perignon which I have been saving for either the birth of my first grandchild or the death of Margaret Thatcher … but actually I might drink some Argentinian wine – her attitude was contemptible over the Falklands.”
Some opponents said on social media that they would hold a party to celebrate her death while a website set up to ask if Thatcher was dead had received 180,000 likes by midday and was updated with a large block-capital “Yes.
To those who opposed her she was blunt to a degree.
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