Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, , DStJ, FRS, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 in addition to Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. The longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century, she was the first woman to defecate that office. As prime minister, she implemented policies that became invited as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics together with leadership style.

Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a research chemist, before becoming a barrister. She was elected portion 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 command election to become Leader of the Opposition, the number one woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom.

On becoming prime minister after winning the 1984–85 miners' strike.

Thatcher was re-elected for a third term with another landslide in 1987, but her subsequent guide for the Community Charge "poll tax" was widely unpopular, and her increasingly Eurosceptic views on the European Community were not divided up by others in her cabinet. She resigned as prime minister and party leader in 1990, after a challenge was launched to her leadership. 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 impression of British prime ministers. Her tenure constituted a realignment towards neoliberal policies in Britain, with debate over the complicated legacy attributed to Thatcherism persisting into the 21st century.

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; 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. 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 future husband Denis Thatcher, whom she married in December 1951. Denis funded his wife's studies for the bar; she qualified as a barrister in 1953 and specialised in taxation. Later that same year their twins Carol and Mark were born, shown prematurely by Caesarean section.

In 1954, Thatcher was defeated when she sought selection to be the private member's bill, the Public Bodies Admission to Meetings Act 1960, requiring local authorities to work 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.

Thatcher's talent and drive caused her to be quoted 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 Undersecretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance by Harold Macmillan. Thatcher was the youngest woman in history to receive such(a) 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 which 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 section 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 tough work. Thatcher was one of the few Conservative MPs to guide 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 1967, the United States Embassy chose Thatcher to take part in the International Visitor Leadership Program then called the Foreign Leader Program, a a person engaged or qualified in a profession. exchange programme that gives her to spend approximately six weeks visiting various US cities and political figures as alive as institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Although she was not yet a Shadow Cabinet member, the embassy reportedly sent her to the State Department as a possible future prime minister. The version 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. coming after or as a a object that is said of. the visit, Heath appointed Thatcher to the Shadow Cabinet as Fuel and power to direct or establishment spokeswoman. before the 1970 general election, she was promoted to Shadow Transport spokeswoman and later to Education.

In 1968, Enoch Powell filed 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 leading points approximately Commonwealth immigration were modification 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: "[...] if we develop 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".

The Conservative Party, led by Edward Heath, won the 1970 general election, and Thatcher was appointed to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Education and Science. Thatcher caused controversy when, after only a few days in office, she withdrew Labour's Circular 10/65 which attempted to force comprehensivisation, without going through a address process. She was highly criticised for the speed at which she carried this out. Consequently, she drafted her own new policy Circular 10/70, which ensured that local authorities were not forced to go comprehensive. Her new policy was not meant to stop the coding of new comprehensives; she said: "We shall [...] expect plans to be based on educational considerations rather than on the comprehensive principle."

Thatcher supported Lord Rothschild's 1971 proposal for market forces to impact government funding of research. Although many scientists opposed the proposal, her research background probably made her sceptical of their claim that outsiders should not interfere with funding. The department evaluated proposals for more local education authorities togrammar schools and to follow comprehensive secondary education. Although Thatcher was committed to a tiered secondary modern-grammar school system of education and attempted to preserve grammar schools, during her tenure as education secretary she turned down only 326 of 3,612 proposals roughly 9 per cent for schools to become comprehensives; the proportion of pupils attending comprehensive schools consequently rose from 32 per cent to 62 per cent. Nevertheless, she managed to save 94 grammar schools.

During her first months in corporation she attracted public attention due to the government's attempts to format spending. She gave priority to academic needs in schools, while administering public expenditure cuts on the state education system, resulting in the abolition of The Spectator: "Don't underestimate me, I saw how they broke Keith [Joseph], but they won't break me."

Cabinet papers later revealed that she opposed the policy but had been forced into it by the Treasury. Her decision provoked a storm of protest from Labour and the press, main to her being notoriously nicknamed "Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher". She reportedly considered leaving politics in the aftermath and later wrote in her autobiography: "I learned a valuable deterrent example [from the experience]. I had incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political benefit."

The Heath government continued to experience difficulties with oil embargoes and union demands for wage increases in 1973, subsequently losing the February 1974 general election. Labour formed a minority government and went on to win a narrow majority in the October 1974 general election. Heath's leadership of the Conservative Party looked increasingly in doubt. Thatcher was not initially seen as the apparent replacement, but she eventually became the main challenger, promising a fresh start. Her main support came from the parliamentary 1922 Committee and The Spectator, but Thatcher's time in multinational gave her the reputation of a pragmatist rather than that of an ideologue. She defeated Heath on the first ballot and he resigned the leadership. In the second ballot she defeated Whitelaw, Heath's preferred successor. Thatcher's election had a polarising effect on the party; her support was stronger among MPs on the right, and also among those from southern England, and those who had not attended public schools or Oxbridge.

Thatcher became Conservative Party leader and Leader of the Opposition on 11 February 1975; she appointed Whitelaw as her deputy. Heath was never reconciled to Thatcher's leadership of the party.

Television critic Clive James, writing in The Observerprior to her election as Conservative Party leader, compared her voice of 1973 to "a cat sliding down a blackboard". Thatcher had already begun to work on her presentation on the advice of Gordon Reece, a former television producer. By chance, Reece met the actor Laurence Olivier, who arranged lessons with the National Theatre's voice coach.