Margaret, Baroness Thatcher

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013), was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold the position. As prime minister, she implemented policies that came to be known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.

Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a research chemist before becoming a barrister. She was elected Member of Parliament for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her secretary of state for education and science in his 1970–1974 government. In 1975, she defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election to become leader of the opposition, the first woman to lead a major political party in the UK.

On becoming prime minister after winning the 1979 general election, Thatcher introduced a series of economic policies intended to reverse high inflation and Britain's struggles in the wake of the Winter of Discontent and an oncoming recession. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised greater individual liberty, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Her popularity in her first years in office waned amid the recession and rising unemployment. Victory in the 1982 Falklands War and the recovering economy brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her landslide re-election in 1983. She survived an assassination attempt by the Provisional IRA in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing and achieved a political victory against the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984–85 miners' strike. In 1986, Thatcher oversaw the deregulation of UK financial markets, leading to an economic boom, in what came to be known as the Big Bang.

Thatcher was re-elected for a third term with another landslide in 1987, but her subsequent support for the Community Charge (also known as the "poll tax") was widely unpopular, and her increasingly Eurosceptic views on the European Community were not shared by others in her cabinet. She resigned as prime minister and party leader in 1990, after a challenge was launched to her leadership, and was succeeded by John Major, her chancellor of the Exchequer. After retiring from the Commons in 1992, she was given a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher (of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire) which entitled her to sit in the House of Lords. In 2013, she died of a stroke at the Ritz Hotel, London, at the age of 87.

A polarising figure in British politics, Thatcher is nonetheless viewed favourably in historical rankings and public opinion of British prime ministers. Her tenure constituted a realignment towards neoliberal policies in Britain; the complex legacy attributed to this shift continues to be debated into the 21st century.

Early life and education

Family and childhood (1925–1943)

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on 13 October 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Her parents were Alfred Roberts (1892–1970), from Northamptonshire, and Beatrice Ethel Stephenson (1888–1960), from Lincolnshire. Her father's maternal grandmother, Catherine Sullivan, was born in County Kerry, Ireland.

Roberts spent her childhood in Grantham, where her father owned a tobacconist's and a grocery shop. In 1938, before the Second World War, the Roberts family briefly gave sanctuary to a teenage Jewish girl who had escaped Nazi Germany. With her elder sister Muriel, Margaret saved pocket money to help pay for the teenager's journey.

Alfred was an alderman and a Methodist local preacher. He brought up his daughter as a strict Wesleyan Methodist, attending the Finkin Street Methodist Church, but Margaret was more sceptical; the future scientist told a friend that she could not believe in angels, having calculated that they needed a breastbone long to support wings. Alfred came from a Liberal family but stood (as was then customary in local government) as an Independent. He served as Mayor of Grantham from 1945 to 1946 and lost his position as alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority on Grantham Council in 1950.

Roberts attended Huntingtower Road Primary School and won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School, a grammar school. Her school reports showed hard work and continual improvement; her extracurricular activities included the piano, field hockey, poetry recitals, swimming and walking. She was head girl in 1942–43, and outside school, while the Second World War was ongoing, she voluntarily worked as a fire watcher in the local ARP service. Other students thought of Roberts as the "star scientist", although mistaken advice regarding cleaning ink from parquetry almost caused chlorine gas poisoning. In her upper sixth year, Roberts was accepted for a scholarship to study chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, a women's college, starting in 1944. After another candidate withdrew, Roberts entered Oxford in October 1943.

Oxford (1943–1947)

Following her arrival at Oxford, Roberts began studies under X-ray crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, the tutor in chemistry for Somerville College since 1934. Hodgkin considered Roberts a "good" student, and later recalled: "One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay." She opted to read for a classified honours degree, entailing an additional year of supervised research. As her thesis supervisor, Hodgkin assigned Roberts to work with Gerhard Schmidt, a researcher in Hodgkin's lab, to determine the structure of the antibiotic peptide gramicidin S. Although the research made some progress, the peptide's structure proved more complex than anticipated, and Schmidt would only determine its full structure much later; Roberts (by then Thatcher) learned this in the 1960s while visiting the Weizmann Institute, where her former research partner was then working.

Roberts graduated in 1947 with a second-class honours degree in chemistry, and in 1950 also received the degree of Master of Arts (as an Oxford BA, she was entitled to the degree 21 terms after her matriculation). Although Hodgkin would later be critical of her former student's politics, they continued to correspond into the 1980s, and Roberts in her memoirs would describe her mentor as "ever-helpful", "a brilliant scientist and a gifted teacher". As prime minister, she would keep a portrait of Hodgkin at 10 Downing Street. Later in life, she was reportedly prouder of becoming the first prime minister with a science degree than becoming the first female prime minister. While prime minister, she attempted to preserve Somerville as a women's college. Twice a week outside study, she worked in a local forces canteen.

During her time at Oxford, Roberts was noted for her isolated and serious attitude. Her first boyfriend, Tony Bray (1926–2014), recalled that she was "very thoughtful and a very good conversationalist. That's probably what interested me. She was good at general subjects".

She was a member of Wesley Memorial Church, became a lay preacher and joined the John Wesley Society. She also attended Somerville College Chapel and St Mary's.

Roberts's coursework involved subjects beyond chemistry as she was already contemplating an entry into law and politics. Her enthusiasm for politics as a girl made Bray think of her as "unusual" and her parents as "slightly austere" and "very proper". Roberts became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946. She was influenced at university by political works such as Friedrich Hayek's ''The Road to Serfdom'' (1944), which condemned economic intervention by government as a precursor to an authoritarian state.

Post-Oxford career (1947–1951)

After graduating, Roberts secured a position as a research chemist for British Xylonite (BX Plastics) following a series of interviews arranged by Oxford; she subsequently moved to Colchester in Essex to work at the firm. Little is known about her brief time there. By her own account, she was initially enthusiastic about the position, as she had been intended to function as a personal assistant to the company's head of research and development, providing opportunities to learn about operations management: "But on my arrival it was decided that there was not enough to do in that capacity." Instead, she seems to have researched methods of attaching polyvinyl chloride (PVC) to metals. While with the firm, she joined the Association of Scientific Workers. In 1948, she applied for a job at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) but was rejected after the personnel department assessed her as "headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated". Jon Agar in '' Notes and Records'' argues that her understanding of modern scientific research later impacted her views as prime minister.

Roberts joined the local Conservative Association and attended the party conference at Llandudno, Wales, in 1948, as a representative of the University Graduate Conservative Association. Meanwhile, she became a high-ranking affiliate of the Vermin Club, a group of grassroots Conservatives formed in response to a derogatory comment made by Aneurin Bevan. One of her Oxford friends was also a friend of the Chair of the Dartford Conservative Association in Kent, who were looking for candidates. Officials of the association were so impressed by her that they asked her to apply, even though she was not on the party's approved list; she was selected in January 1950 (aged 24) and added to the approved list ''post ante''.

At a dinner following her formal adoption as Conservative candidate for Dartford in February 1949, she met divorcé Denis Thatcher, a successful and wealthy businessman, who drove her to her Essex train. After their first meeting, she described him to Muriel as "not a very attractive creature – very reserved but quite nice". In preparation for the election, Roberts moved to Dartford, while she supported herself by working as a research chemist for J. Lyons and Co. in Hammersmith, reportedly as part of a team developing emulsifiers for ice cream. As the work was more theoretical in nature than during her prior role with BX Plastics, Roberts found it "more satisfying". While at Lyons, she worked under the supervision of Hans Jellinek, who headed the company's physical chemistry section. Jellinek assigned her to research the saponification of α-monostearin (glycerol monostearate), which has properties as an emulsifier, stabiliser and food preservative. Agar has noted the research may have been connected with the emulsification of ice cream, but only as a possibility. In September 1951, their research was published in the ''Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture'', a recently launched publication of the Society of Chemical Industry, as "The saponification of α-monostearin in a monolayer". This would be Roberts's sole scientific publication. In 1979, following his former assistant's election as prime minister, Jellinek, by then a professor of physical chemistry at Clarkson University in the United States, said she had done "a very good job" on the project, "showing great determination". She sent Jellinek a congratulatory letter upon his retirement in 1984, and another letter shortly before his death two years later.

Roberts married at Wesley's Chapel and her children were baptised there, but she and her husband began attending Church of England services and would later convert to Anglicanism.

Early political career

In the 1950 and 1951 general elections, Roberts was the Conservative candidate for the Labour seat of Dartford. The local party selected her as its candidate because, though not a dynamic public speaker, Roberts was well-prepared and fearless in her answers. A prospective candidate, Bill Deedes, recalled: "Once she opened her mouth, the rest of us began to look rather second-rate." She attracted media attention as the youngest and the only female candidate; in 1950, she was the youngest Conservative candidate in the country. She lost on both occasions to Norman Dodds but reduced the Labour majority by 6,000 and then a further 1,000. During the campaigns, she was supported by her parents and by her future husband Denis Thatcher, whom she married in December 1951. She trained at the Inns of Court School of Law (now part of The City Law School) and qualified as a barrister in 1953 (specialising in taxation). Denis funded his wife's studies for the bar. Later that same year, their twins Carol and Mark were born, delivered prematurely by Caesarean section.

Member of Parliament (1959–1970)

In 1954, Thatcher was defeated when she sought selection to be the Conservative Party candidate for the Orpington by-election of January 1955. She chose not to stand as a candidate in the 1955 general election, in later years, stating: "I really just felt the twins were ..only two, I really felt that it was too soon. I couldn't do that." Afterwards, Thatcher began looking for a Conservative safe seat and was selected as the candidate for Finchley in April 1958 (narrowly beating Ian Montagu Fraser). She was elected as MP for the seat after a hard campaign in the 1959 election. Benefiting from her fortunate result in a lottery for backbenchers to propose new legislation, Thatcher's maiden speech was, unusually, in support of her private member's bill, the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960, requiring local authorities to hold their council meetings in public; the bill was successful and became law. In 1961 she went against the Conservative Party's official position by voting for the restoration of birching as a judicial corporal punishment.

On the frontbenches

Thatcher's talent and drive caused her to be mentioned as a future prime minister in her early 20s although she herself was more pessimistic, stating as late as 1970: "There will not be a woman prime minister in my lifetime – the male population is too prejudiced." In October 1961 she was promoted to the frontbench as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry for Pensions by Harold Macmillan. Thatcher was the youngest woman in history to receive such a post, and among the first MPs elected in 1959 to be promoted. After the Conservatives lost the 1964 election, she became spokeswoman on housing and land. In that position, she advocated her party's policy of giving tenants the right to buy their council houses. She moved to the Shadow Treasury team in 1966 and, as Treasury spokeswoman, opposed Labour's mandatory price and income controls, arguing they would unintentionally produce effects that would distort the economy.

Jim Prior suggested Thatcher as a Shadow Cabinet member after the Conservatives' 1966 defeat, but party leader Edward Heath and Chief Whip William Whitelaw eventually chose Mervyn Pike as the Conservative shadow cabinet's sole woman member. At the 1966 Conservative Party conference, Thatcher criticised the high-tax policies of the Labour government as being steps "not only towards Socialism, but towards Communism", arguing that lower taxes served as an incentive to hard work. Thatcher was one of the few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's bill to decriminalise male homosexuality. She voted in favour of David Steel's bill to legalise abortion, as well as a ban on hare coursing. She supported the retention of capital punishment and voted against the relaxation of divorce laws.

In the Shadow Cabinet

In 1967, the United States Embassy chose Thatcher to take part in the International Visitor Leadership Program (then called the Foreign Leader Program), a professional exchange programme that allowed her to spend about six weeks visiting various US cities and political figures as well as institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Although she was not yet a Shadow Cabinet member, the embassy reportedly described her to the State Department as a possible future prime minister. The description helped Thatcher meet with prominent people during a busy itinerary focused on economic issues, including Paul Samuelson, Walt Rostow, Pierre-Paul Schweitzer and Nelson Rockefeller. Following the visit, Heath appointed Thatcher to the Shadow Cabinet as fuel and power spokeswoman. Before the 1970 general election, she was promoted to shadow transport spokeswoman and later to education.

In 1968, Enoch Powell delivered his "Rivers of Blood" speech in which he strongly criticised Commonwealth immigration to the United Kingdom and the then-proposed Race Relations Bill. When Heath telephoned Thatcher to inform her that he would sack Powell from the Shadow Cabinet, she recalled that she "really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis". She believed that his main points about Commonwealth immigration were correct and that the selected quotations from his speech had been taken out of context. In a 1991 interview for ''Today'', Thatcher stated that she thought Powell had "made a valid argument, if in sometimes regrettable terms".

Around this time, she gave her first Commons speech as a shadow transport minister and highlighted the need for investment in British Rail. She argued: " we build bigger and better roads, they would soon be saturated with more vehicles and we would be no nearer solving the problem." Thatcher made her first visit to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1969 as the Opposition transport spokeswoman, and in October, delivered a speech celebrating her ten years in Parliament. In early 1970, she told ''The Finchley Press'' that she would like to see a "reversal of the permissive society".

Education Secretary (1970–1974)

The Conservative Party, led by Edward Heath, won the 1970 general election, and Thatcher was appointed to the Cabinet of the United Kingdom">Cabinet