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She was the first prime minister to be more accountable to the international market than to the British economy. Mrs Thatcher told the assembly: "It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.". Margaret Thatcher Curriculum Vitae. "Maggie! After being carried through the streets of London in a flag-draped coffin aboard a gun carriage, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was laid to rest this . Margaret Thatcher formally tendered her resignation to the Queen early this morning after leaving Downing Street for the last time. Ronald Reagan, the former 40th president of the United States died on June 5th of 2004. This is accomplished by this baseless moral precept that it is gauche or worse to balance the gushing praise for them upon death with valid criticisms. For her own part, she was a social conservative and yet today's right for, say, gay couples to marry if they want to fits with one aspect of the Thatcherite vision of personal choice. The fact that the Thatcher question even gets asked confirms vividly just what an upas tree she remains for Scottish Toryism. Yet her long-term effect seems to have been to destroy it. We had an all-out blistering row that delighted the organisers. which revealed a good deal as to her political Margaret Thatcher's 1980 speech was written by playwright Ronnie Miller, and Julia recalls that the night before delivering the speech she had a huge row with him about the content. The place was her office at the Department of Education, then in Curzon Street. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. The speakers form a rollcall of the globe's most interesting thinkers: Amartya Sen, the Nobel-winning Indian economist; Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli psychologist and another Nobel winner; and Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, who focused on land rights for the poor. Adam Smith's invisible hand ended up raising two fingers to her moral project. Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? But what bound all opposition to Margaret Thatcher's programme was a suspicion that the grocer's daughter was intent on monetising human value, that she had no heart and, famously, cared little for the impulses that bind individuals into a society. Another head of government died recently who, like Thatcher, was called divisive. Thatcher refused to recognise the right of citizens to vote for representatives of their choice. In her 1982 party conference speech, Margaret Thatcher offered a prediction for the future: "How absurd it will seem in a few years' time that the state ran Pickfords removals and Gleneagles Hotel . Many hated her. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning? A couple of days later on the 11th, Margaret Thatcher the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote an eulogy for Ronald Reagan. for the disk. Arthur Scargill and the miners represented the only opposition to the prime minister and her destructive and divisive values and, after the strike, the way was open for the most aggressive neoliberal policies. But former speechwriter Trevor Reeves can no longer . Heath took us into Europe, and a referendum in spring 1975 confirmed national approval for the move. But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation. (MT gave up public Today we have four coalmines and around 2,000 miners. Rather, she was a classic example of a certain kind of conservative woman who believed that all women should pull themselves up just as she had done, conveniently overlooking that not all women are blessed with the privileges that had been available to her, such as a wealthy and supportive husband and domestic help. she She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. No sign they learned from her that markets don't move in to fill the gaps when the state is rolled back not then, not now. was an Oxford student home for the university holidays. ROBIN HARRIS worked for the Conservative Party from 1978, and increasingly closely with Margaret Thatcher herself from 1985, writing her speeches and advising on policy. John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. There was, for example, the time in the late 1970s when, as Opposition Leader, she almost succeeded in censoring the one half-decent joke in a key campaign speech. Though the Thatcher years could also be called the Saatchi years, reaching a new level of presentational sophistication in the annals of British politics, they weren't about getting the leader liked. making her big speech the following day as scheduled. Several strong women on the continent have risen to the top, but thisBritish woman, in Britain of all places, became a phenomenon, first, throughher gender. camps were revealed in August 1992. As the authorised biographer of Margaret Thatcher, I was given special permission by the Cabinet Secretary to see government papers not yet released to the public.For . Only today are we facing the cost. Even the nasty politics of "welfare reform" is driven by the high cost of subsidising low pay through in-work benefits, and indifference to the plight of jobless communities who have never recovered from de-industrialisation. It was thoroughly "wet". It may be wrong to imagine that she intended to de-industrialise Britain, but the policies followed by her government had that effect. of her best Parliamentary speeches in a debate on the strikes. From a peak of 13 million in 1979, trade union membership had declined by 30% by 1990, and is now not much more than half what it was. To project the ideas of strength and . The dockers. Margaret expresses that Reagan's leadership was the key to ending The Cold War and unifying a formerly divided nation. She was 87. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. Thatcher became prime minister because she was a woman, not despite it. The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. Copyright Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2023. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. an interviewer "there is no such thing as society", "We have not One also can't forget what happened to the agency that made Thatcher worldfamous: the Conservative party, of which she seemed such an improbable leader. ", As Matthew Parris evocatively put it in Monday's Times, "She rather liked men (preferring our company, perhaps, to that of women), [but] she thought us the weaker sex. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. She made her remarks Perhaps, though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke, perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. The word "free" is used to help the audience She all but erased his political legacy to stamp her own image on the nation, so Britain before and after Thatcher were two different countries. Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to Of all the things to criticise Thatcher for, calling her out for being a woman seems like something of a wasted bullet. Collins (Oxford University Press, 1998-2000). June 5, 1992 - Is named a life peer on the Queen's honor list. She had just finished the first volume of her memoirs, which she insisted was all her own work. "No, no, no". In former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's eulogy speech for President Ronald Reagan (2004), she elucidates what a kind and powerful man he was. Keith Joseph was her guru. This is a political style, an aesthetic even, that has disappeared from view. She was able to reach So we agreed to reactivate the back channel. Not until well out of office, angry and lacking her old judgment, did she lead the rabidly Eurosceptic renegades. Maybe it was the sound of the estuary pronunciation robbing her of her aspirational airs, a prototype of the Bouquet/Bucket joke. And nor could Thatcher, much to her relief as she allegedly abhorred the word, as doubtless Chanel did, too. Having no social or political connection with the class most affected, she gave a very good impression of not caring. In October 1984 she survived an IRA bomb during the Conservative Conference In front of his journalist colleagues he was told to stand right in front of her so that she could hit him lightly with her order papers. On June 11th, 2004 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American people at Ronald Reagan's funeral. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. March 7, 1991 - Receives the US Medal of Freedom from President George Bush. They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot (20 At the October 1980 Conservative Conference, in the midst of economic recession, Making sure the verdict wasn't purloined by others. Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. speech in July 1945, delivered in a town close to Grantham while she Lady Thatcher, you honor us by coming to the site of Sir Winston's pivotal speech, an event Westminster College has immortalized with the beautiful Winston Churchill Memorial. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.". Reagan's decision to bomb Libya, spoke It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. Reversing Britain's long-term economic decline. Capitalism flourishes on debt, but she insisted that economics were best understood as Mr Micawber's formula in which happiness and misery were separated by a shilling. outlook at the time. Thatcher's passing is marked by street parties in Brixton, Belfast, Bristol, Derry, Glasgow and Liverpool, and seething bitterness among the mining families and communities she was allowed (including by scab union and Labour leaders) to destroy. She was a gentle and peaceable woman my mother, that is and said few hard words about anyone, but in certain parts of the United Kingdom, and among certain social classes, Mrs T was detested, and not just for what people thought were her policies but for her persona for what she was. It made minor savings at best and was, as the . Their target was "the enemy within" working-class power and the so-called culture of entitlement. deeply felt eulogy, filmed in advance and relayed by video link to screens in the National Cathedral in Washington. When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. In fact, Margaret Thatcher was known for her lack of a sense of humour. I was on my own. Both were successful women who could play the flirt card when it suited them, but ultimately had little interest in being kind to their own sex; Thatcher especially resented being defined by her gender. And by my own firsthand experience, it was genuine to the core. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. Selling off the family silver Harold Macmillan and later Labour called it, as Margaret Thatcher set about reversing the 1945 nationalisations that had put oil, gas, coal, electricity and an airline as well as a house removal company in public hands. Well, everything really, even her name. One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. Thatcher's reign helped to inspire alternative comedy by creating a generation so bereft of hope that they started putting on gigs just for the sake of something to do. Nicknamed the "Iron Lady," Thatcher served as the prime minister of England from 1979 to 1990. And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. Second was the particular hostility towards Margaret Thatcher and her local ministerial spear-carrier, energy minister and incumbent MP of 13 years' standing, Hamish Gray. Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. Somesay she revolutionised British politics certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman but it served a reactionary end. We still live in the land Margaret built. It was a visit warmly welcomed by President Reagan, with a resplendent state nner on the first evening. In short, miners believed in society. Visit a station and notice the plethora of competing train companies, replacing the single British Rail that operated in the pre-Thatcher days the fruit of a rail privatisation that was not hers, but was made possible only by the serial privatisations she had pioneered and made normal. This was heightened by the suspicion that this power was not consciously deployed. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. Maggie was a fully formed comedy character before comedians had even gotten to her. Under Heath and Jim Callaghan the question was widely asked: had democracies become "ungovernable"? It is not true that Thatcher didn't care about the media. Endeavouring to persuade the British into an attitude of hostility to the group with which she spent 11 years deepening their connection must take a high place in any catalogue of anti-statesmanship.