Margaret Thatcher died on 8 April 2013. But the UK’s longest-serving post-war prime minister still casts a long shadow over politics today, more than a decade later.
Only last week the Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer cited her example in support of his deregulation plans. “In the 1980s, the Thatcher government deregulated finance capital…,” he wrote in The Times, “This is our equivalent.”
No British woman leader other than Elizabeth I has been the subject of so many plays and films, or impersonated by so many actors.
The Iron Lady has been played by Meryl Streep, Gillian Anderson, Lindsay Duncan and Andrea Riseborough, among others.
Harriet Walter takes the lead in the latest Channel 4 drama Brian and Maggie, which recreates a TV interview in which the real Thatcher confirmed to journalist Brian Walden that she did not believe in “equality”.
A year of anniversaries
This is a big year for admirers – and detractors – of Thatcher.
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This October marks 100 years since her birth in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the daughter of a grocer.
The Westminster thinktank Policy Exchange is launching The Thatcher Centenary Project. This week it held its inaugural meeting marking an equally important Thatcher anniversary: 50 years since she became the leader of the Conservative Party.
On 5 February 1979, Thatcher scored a surprise victory over the incumbent Ted Heath in the first round of the Conservative leadership election, winning the votes of 130 MPs to Heath’s 119.
Sir Hugh Fraser MP, husband of the glamorous author Lady Antonia Fraser, also ran, garnering 16 votes.
Heath was out. He had been elected prime minister in 1970 and took the UK into the European Community, but after an economically damaging period of confrontation with trade unions, he was defeated in two general elections in 1974.
In the second round on 11 February 1975, she was elected leader of the opposition by a majority knock-out, 146 votes to 79 for Willie Whitelaw, 19 each for Jim Prior and Geoffrey Howe, and 11 for John Peyton.
She became the first female leader of a major British political party.
Four years later she beat Labour’s Jim Callaghan in the general election to become Britain’s first woman prime minister.
She would go on to win two further elections, and be prime minister for 11 years, until she was forced out by her party in the autumn of 1990 – a fate she put down to “treachery”.
‘We need impact’
That was more than 30 years ago and does not explain why she is still such a potent icon today, both hated and revered.
The explanation lies partly in the way in which her policies transformed Britain, partly in her political success and partly in the force of her character.
As she wrote in a letter to her daughter Carol: “Brain power is not enough. We need personality and impact as well.”
I started to cover British politics from about 1983 and interviewed Mrs Thatcher quite often.
She was great to talk to because she engaged, even with a young reporter, and seemed to enjoy being challenged while arguing her position with conviction.
In her later years in Downing Street, she lost this openness and ability to respond to those who disagreed with her.
Months before her downfall, I remember the cabinet minister Chris Patten complaining: “She’ll have to go. She’s stopped listening.”
In foreign affairs, her years in power included a military victory to retake the Falkland Islands, a genuinely special relationship with US president Ronald Reagan, detente with Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet Union imploded and an increasingly sceptical approach to membership of what became the European Union.
At home, Sir Keir is still praising her for the “meaningful change” she made to Britain/he and Rachel Reeves are trying on her clothes as they try to emulate her efforts to “drag Britain out of its stupor by letting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”.
This prime minister is now looking to the private sector to provide homes and build infrastructure.
The milk snatcher
Thatcher’s former speechwriter John O’Sullivan views her election as Tory leader as “the first big victory for radical Conservatism”.
She set about selling off council houses to create a “property-owning democracy” and began privatisation of many nationalised industries.
There was a widescale deindustrialisation of Britain’s traditional heavy industries and simultaneous deregulation which led to a boom in the services and financial sector.
She confronted trade union power and defeated the National Union of Mineworkers’ strike.
Unsurprisingly, she became a hate figure to many on the centre and left of British politics.
At my children’s primary school in the 1980s and ’90s there was a playground rhyme about “Margaret Thatcher milk snatcher”, a reference to the cancellation of free milk for school children during her time as Heath’s education secretary.
There is a song “Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher/ We all celebrate today /’Cause it’s one day closer to your death” in 2005’s Billy Liar The Musical.
The audience voted to keep it in when she died in 2013.
Disciples of the Iron Lady
Thatcher’s legacy has been complicated for Conservative politicians.
They continue to argue over whether Thatcher in her prime would have been a leave or remain voter in the 2016 referendum.
Read more:
Obituary of the Iron Lady
Thatcher refused to share flight with panda
Thirty years on from Thatcher’s No10 exit
She campaigned to join the EEC, enjoyed sparring with Brussels as prime minister, but became a bitter critic in her post-Downing Street decline.
Her immediate successor, John Major, built on Thatcherite policies but was heavily critical of her behaviour as a self-declared “back seat driver”.
Tory leaders since Major have all claimed to be her disciples.
From cold to warm in Labour land
On the Labour side, attitudes have generally warmed up over the years.
Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader who was beaten by Thatcher in 1992 and 1997, insists that the only thing he admires about her is her success as a woman. John Smith challenged her economic approach.
Tony Blair invited her for a private discussion in Number 10 soon after his general election victory and continued to treat her with wary respect.
Gordon Brown went further. He welcomed the then 81-year-old to tea in Downing Street and told journalists: “I admire Lady Thatcher… I am a conviction politician like her.”
On her death, Ed Miliband paid tribute to a woman who “broke the mould”.
Jeremy Corbyn, the left-winger who led Labour between 2015 and 2020, was the exception.
He stuck by the barbs he had aimed at prime minister Thatcher when he was a backbench Labour MP: “Every week, I speak to renters threatened with eviction. Homeless people struggling to survive. Parents using food banks. Elderly people who can’t afford heating. That is the legacy of Thatcherism. We will never achieve meaningful change until it ends for good.”
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Today Sir Keir is happy to strike Thatcherite poses.
Ironically, while some Conservatives are celebrating Thatcher this year, other Tories want to move on.
Kwasi Kwarteng, who served briefly as Liz Truss’s “kamikaze” chancellor, chose this anniversary year to warn “modern politicians” that “they should not indulge in a grotesque cosplay of an idealised Thatcher who only ever existed in their imagination”.
The debate is as lively as ever about Thatcher and her legacy.
She is not forgotten – whether people actually knew her when she was alive or not.
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One thing everyone agrees on is that she always enjoyed a good argument, until her declining years.
With Churchill and Blair she is one of the most memorable British prime ministers of her century and her much-disputed political soul goes marching on into the next one.
