Margaret Thatcher(1925–2013)

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on the thirteenth of October 1925 above the family grocer's shop at the corner of North Parade and Broad Street, Grantham, Lincolnshire, second daughter of Alfred Roberts, a self-employed grocer who served as alderman, JP and lay Methodist preacher, and Beatrice Stephenson Roberts. Her father, by every later account in her own memoirs and speeches, was the central formative figure of her life: a small-town Methodist Liberal Unionist whose teaching at the lay pulpit on Sunday and behind the counter through the week formed the moral and economic vocabulary of her later politics. She won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School, became head girl, and won the place at Somerville College, Oxford, where she took her degree in chemistry in 1947 under Dorothy Hodgkin and was elected the third female President of the Oxford University Conservative Association.

She worked as a research chemist at BX Plastics in Manningtree and at J. Lyons and Company through the late 1940s and early 1950s (where she was part of the team that developed the emulsification process for the first commercial soft-scoop ice cream), read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn in the evenings, was called to the bar in 1953 specialising in tax law, and was elected Conservative member of Parliament for Finchley in October 1959 at the third attempt, in her thirty-fourth year. She served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at Pensions in the Macmillan government of 1961 to 1964, as opposition spokesman through the 1960s, and as Secretary of State for Education and Science in the Heath government of 1970 to 1974, in which post she founded the Open University expansion and oversaw the comprehensive-school transition in England and Wales.

She defeated Edward Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party in February 1975, becoming the first woman elected to lead a major British political party, and on the fourth of May 1979, on a Conservative majority of forty-three seats, became the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She held the office for eleven years and six months, the longest continuous British prime-ministerial tenure of the twentieth century, was returned at the general elections of 1983 (with a hundred-and-forty-four seat majority) and 1987 (a hundred-and-two seat majority), and led the country through the most consequential decade of economic and constitutional change since the post-war Attlee settlement.

Her tenure transformed the British economy and the British state. The Right to Buy of 1980 transferred over one and a half million council houses into the freehold ownership of their tenant families. The privatisations of British Telecom (1984), British Gas (1986), British Airways (1987), British Steel (1988) and the regional water and electricity companies through the late 1980s returned to private ownership the nationalised industries the post-war Labour governments had taken into state hands. The Financial Services Act of 1986 and the Big Bang deregulation of the City of October 1986 made London the leading international financial centre of Europe, the position it has held for the four decades since. The trade-union reforms of the Employment Acts of 1980, 1982 and 1984 restored the rule of law to the British industrial-relations system. By the end of her tenure the British economy had moved from the inflation-and-strike crisis of the 1970s to the longest sustained period of growth in the post-war period.

Her foreign policy was the second great theatre of her tenure. She refused on the second of April 1982 to accept the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands and within seventy-two hours had ordered a naval task force of over a hundred ships, twenty-eight thousand military personnel and the Royal Marines and Parachute Regiments to sail eight thousand miles for the recovery of the territory; the islands were recovered after seventy-four days of fighting on the fourteenth of June 1982 in the largest British amphibious operation since Suez. She formed through the 1980s the political partnership with Ronald Reagan and the personal working relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev (the man we can do business with) that drove the western alliance through the closing phase of the Cold War, supported the deployment of US cruise missiles at Greenham Common from 1983, and saw the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1989 to 1991. She was elevated to the House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in 1992, was awarded the Order of the Garter in 1995, and died on the eighth of April 2013 at the Ritz Hotel in London in her eighty-eighth year. She was given the ceremonial funeral with full military honours at St Paul's Cathedral on the seventeenth of April 2013, the first British political funeral on that scale since Winston Churchill in 1965. The Thatcher name in modern British political history carries the weight of the eleven and a half years she held the office, the first woman to do so and the longest continuous tenure of the twentieth century.