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| This is a 1969 file photo showing Margaret Thatcher. Ex-spokesman Tim Bell says that former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has died. She was 87. Bell said the woman known to friends and foes as "the Iron Lady" passed away Monday morning, Aprilo 8, 2013. |
LONDON (AP) -- Love her or loathe her, one thing's beyond dispute: Margaret Thatcher transformed Britain.
The
Iron Lady, who ruled for 11 remarkable years, imposed her will on a
fractious, rundown nation - breaking the unions, triumphing in a far-off
war, and selling off state industries at a record pace. She left behind
a leaner government and more prosperous nation by the time a political
mutiny ousted her from No. 10 Downing Street.
Thatcher's spokesman, Tim Bell, said the former prime minister died from a stroke Monday morning at the Ritz hotel in London.
As
flags were flown at half-staff at Buckingham Palace, Parliament and
Downing Street for the 87-year-old, praise for Thatcher and her
leadership poured in from around the world.
"Margaret
Thatcher undoubtedly was one of the most remarkable political figures
of the modern world," said Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin
said Thatcher "made a significant contribution to the development of
the Soviet-British and Russian-British ties, which we will always
remember with gratitude."
President Barack
Obama said many Americans "will never forget her standing shoulder to
shoulder with President (Ronald) Reagan, reminding the world that we are
not simply carried along by the currents of history. We can shape them
with moral conviction, unyielding courage and iron will."
Queen
Elizabeth II authorized a ceremonial funeral - a step short of a state
funeral - to be held for Thatcher at St. Paul's Cathedral in London next
week with military honors.
Prime Minister
David Cameron cut short a trip to Madrid and Paris to return to Britain
following news of Thatcher's death, and said Parliament would be
recalled from recess on Wednesday so lawmakers could pay tribute.
For
admirers, Thatcher was a savior who rescued Britain from ruin and laid
the groundwork for an extraordinary economic renaissance. For critics,
she was a heartless tyrant who ushered in an era of greed that kicked
the weak out onto the streets and let the rich become filthy rich.
"Let
us not kid ourselves. She was a very divisive figure," said Bernard
Ingham, Thatcher's press secretary for her entire term. "She was a real
toughie. She was a patriot with a great love for this country, and she
raised the standing of Britain abroad."
Thatcher was the first - and still only - female prime minister in Britain's history. But she often found feminists tiresome.
Her
boxy, black handbag became such a recognizable part of her image that
her way of dressing down ministers and opponents became known as
"handbagging."
A grocer's daughter, she rose
to the top of Britain's snobbish hierarchy the hard way, and envisioned a
classless society that rewarded hard work and determination.
She
was a trailblazer who at first believed trailblazing impossible:
Thatcher told the Liverpool Daily Post in 1974 that she did not think a
woman would serve as party leader or prime minister during her lifetime.
But once in power, she never showed an ounce of doubt.
Thatcher
could be intimidating to those working for her. British diplomats
sighed with relief on her first official visit to Washington, D.C., as
prime minister to find that she was relaxed enough to enjoy a glass of
whiskey and a half-glass of wine during an embassy lunch, according to
official documents.
Like her close friend and
political ally Ronald Reagan, Thatcher seemed motivated by an unshakable
belief that free markets would build a better country than reliance on a
strong, central government. Another thing she shared with the American
president: a tendency to reduce problems to their basics, choose a path,
and follow it to the end, no matter what the opposition.
She
formed a deep attachment to the man she called "Ronnie" - some spoke of
it as a schoolgirl crush. Still, she would not back down when she
disagreed with him on important matters, even though the United States
was the richer and vastly stronger partner in the so-called "special
relationship."
Thatcher was at her brashest
when Britain was challenged. When Argentina's military junta seized the
remote Falklands Islands from Britain in 1982, she did not hesitate,
even though her senior military advisers said it might not be feasible
to reclaim the islands.
She simply would not
allow Britain to be pushed around, particularly by military dictators,
said Ingham, who recalls the Falklands War as the tensest period of
Thatcher's three terms in power. When diplomacy failed, she dispatched a
military task force that accomplished her goal, despite the naysayers.
"That
required enormous leadership," Ingham said. "This was a formidable
undertaking, this was a risk with a capital R-I-S-K, and she
demonstrated her leadership by saying she would give the military their
marching orders and let them get on with it."
In
deciding on war, Thatcher overruled Foreign Office specialists who
warned her about the dangers of striking back. She was infuriated by
warnings about the dangers to British citizens in Argentina and the
difficulty of getting support from the U.N. Security Council.
"When
you are at war you cannot allow the difficulties to dominate your
thinking: you have to set out with an iron will to overcome them," she
said in her memoir, "Downing Street Years."
`'And
anyway what was the alternative? That a common or garden dictator
should rule over the queen's subjects and prevail by fraud and violence?
Not while I was prime minister."
Thatcher's
determination to reclaim the islands brought her into conflict with
Reagan, who dispatched Secretary of State Alexander Haig on a shuttle
mission to London and Buenos Aires to seek a peaceful solution, even as
British warships approached the Falklands.
A private diary kept by U.S. diplomat Jim Rentschler captures Thatcher at this crisis point.
"And
here's Maggie, appearing in a flower-decorated salon adjoining the
small dining room (...) sipping orange juice and sherry," Rentschler
wrote. "La Thatcher is really quite fetching in a dark velvet two-piece
ensemble with grosgrain piping and a soft hairdo that heightens her
blond English coloring."
But the niceties faded over the dinner table.
"High
color is in her cheeks, a note of rising indignation in her voice, she
leans across the polished table and flatly rejects what she calls the
`woolliness' of our secondstage formulation," Rentschler writes.
Needless to say, Haig's peace mission soon collapsed.
The
relatively quick triumph of British forces revived Thatcher's political
fortunes, which had been faltering along with the British economy. She
won an overwhelming victory in 1983, tripling her majority in the House
of Commons.
She trusted her gut instinct,
famously concluding early on that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
represented a clear break in the Soviet tradition of autocratic rulers.
She pronounced that the West could "do business" with him, a position
that influenced Reagan's vital dealings with Gorbachev in the twilight
of the Soviet era.
It was heady stuff for a
woman who had little training in foreign affairs when she triumphed over
a weak field of indecisive Conservative Party candidates to take over
the party leadership in 1975 and ultimately run as the party's candidate
for prime minister.
She profited from the
enormous crisis facing the Labour Party government led by Harold Wilson
and later James Callaghan. Britain was near economic collapse, its
currency propped up by the International Monetary Fund, and its
once-defiant spirit seemingly broken.
The
sagging Labour government had no parliamentary majority after 1977, and
the next year it suffered through a "winter of discontent" with
widespread strikes disrupting vital public services, including hospital
care and even grave digging. The government's effort to hold the line on
inflation led to chaos in the streets.
Britain seemed adrift, no longer a credible world power, falling from second- to third-tier status.
It
was then, Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, that she came to the
unshakable, almost mystical belief that only she could save Britain. She
cited a deep "inner conviction" that this would be her role.
Events
seemed to be moving her way when she led the Conservative Party to
victory in 1979, with a commitment to reduce the state's role and
champion private enterprise.
She was
underestimated at first - by her own party, by the media, later by
foreign adversaries. But they all soon learned to respect her.
Thatcher's "Iron Lady" nickname was coined by Soviet journalists, a
grudging testament to her ferocious will and determination.
Thatcher
set about upending decades of liberal doctrine, successfully
challenging Britain's welfare state and socialist traditions, in the
process becoming the reviled bete noire of the country's left-wing
intelligentsia.
She is perhaps best remembered
for her hardline position during the pivotal strike in 1984 and 1985
when she faced down coal miners in an ultimately successful bid to break
the power of Britain's unions. It was a reshaping of the British
economic and political landscape that endures to this day.
It
is for this that she is revered by free-market conservatives, who say
the restructuring of the economy led to a boom that made London the
rival of New York as a global financial center. The left demonized her
as an implacably hostile union buster, with stone-cold indifference to
the poor. But her economic philosophy eventually crossed party lines:
Tony Blair led a revamped Labour Party to victory by adopting some of
her ideas.
Thatcher was the West's most
outspoken opponent of imposing economic sanctions on South Africa's
minority government to end apartheid. She contended such sanctions cost
jobs, including in Britain, hurt South Africa's black majority most and
harden white resistance to change.
In 1986,
Britain's Cabinet unanimously supported her resistance to such
sanctions. As a result, protests ensued and many accused her of
supporting the apartheid regime.
Margaret
Hilda Roberts was born on Oct. 13, 1925. She learned the values of
thrift, discipline and industry as the dutiful daughter of Alfred
Roberts, a grocer and Methodist lay preacher who eventually became the
mayor of Grantham, a modest-sized town in Lincolnshire, 180 kilometers
(110 miles) north of London.
Thatcher's
personality, like that of so many of her contemporaries, was shaped in
part by the traumatic events during her childhood. When World War II
broke out, her hometown was one of the early targets for Luftwaffe
bombs. Her belief in the need to stand up to aggressors was rooted in
the failure of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's attempt to appease
Adolf Hitler rather than confront him.
Thatcher
said she learned much about the world simply by studying her father's
business. She grew up in the family's apartment just above the shop.
"Before
I read a line from the great liberal economists, I knew from my
father's accounts that the free market was like a vast sensitive nervous
system, responding to events and signals all over the world to meet the
ever-changing needs of peoples in different countries, from different
classes, of different religions, with a kind of benign indifference to
their status," she wrote in her memoirs.
"The
economic history of Britain for the next 40 years confirmed and
amplified almost every item of my father's practical economics. In
effect, I had been equipped at an early age with the ideal mental
outlook and tools of analysis for reconstructing an economy ravaged by
state socialism."
Educated at Oxford, Thatcher
began her political career in her mid-20s with an unsuccessful 1950
campaign for a parliamentary seat in the Labour Party stronghold of
Dartford. She earned nationwide publicity as the youngest female
candidate in the country, despite her loss at the polls.
She
was defeated again the next year, but on the campaign trail she met
Denis Thatcher, a successful businessman whom she married in 1951. Their
twins, Mark and Carol, were born two years later.
"She
was beautiful, gay, very kind and thoughtful," Denis Thatcher said in
an interview 25 years later. "Who could meet Margaret without being
completely slain by her personality and intellectual brilliance?"
As
the first male Downing Street spouse, Denis Thatcher stayed out of the
limelight to a large degree while supporting his wife on her many
travels and public engagements. He was said to give her important
behind-the-scenes advice on Cabinet choices and other personnel matters,
but this role was not publicly discussed.
Margaret
Thatcher first won election to Parliament in 1959, representing
Finchley in north London. She climbed the Conservative Party ladder
quickly, joining the Cabinet as education secretary in 1970.
In
that post, she earned the unwanted nickname "Thatcher the milk
snatcher" because of her reduction of school milk programs. It was a
taste of battles to come.
As prime minister,
she sold off one state industry after another: British Telecom, British
Gas, Rolls-Royce, British Airways, British Coal, British Steel, the
water companies and the electricity distribution system among them. She
was proud of her government's role in privatizing some public housing,
turning tenants into homeowners.
She ruffled
feathers simply by being herself. She had faith - sometimes blind faith -
in the clarity of her vision and little use for those of a more
cautious mien.
Success in the Falklands War
set the stage for a pivotal fight with the National Union of Miners,
which began a 51-week strike in March 1984 to oppose the government's
plans to close a number of mines.
The miners battled police on picket lines but couldn't beat Thatcher, and returned to work without gaining any concessions.
She
survived an audacious 1984 assassination attempt by the Irish
Republican Army that nearly succeeded. The IRA detonated a bomb in her
hotel in Brighton during a party conference, killing and injuring senior
government figures, but leaving the prime minister and her husband
unharmed.
Thatcher won a third term in another landslide in 1987, but may have become overconfident.
She
trampled over cautionary advice from her own ministers in 1989 and 1990
by imposing a hugely controversial "community charge" tax that was
quickly dubbed a "poll tax" by opponents. It was designed to move
Britain away from a property tax and instead imposed a flat rate tax on
every adult except for retirees and people who were registered
unemployed.
That decision may have been a sign
that hubris was undermining Thatcher's political acumen. Tens of
thousands of protesters took to the streets in London and other cities,
leading to some of the worst riots in the British capital in more than a
century.
The shocking sight of Trafalgar
Square turned into a smoldering battleground on March 31, 1990, helped
convince many Conservative figures that Thatcher had stayed too long.
"How
could a leader who was wise make 13 million people pay a tax they had
never paid before? It just showed that she was no longer thinking in a
rational way," one of her junior ministers, David Mellor, said in a BBC
documentary.
For Conservatives in Parliament,
it was a question of survival. They feared vengeful voters would turn
them out of office at the next election, and for many that fear trumped
any gratitude they might have felt for their longtime leader.
Eight
months after the riots, Thatcher was gone, struggling to hold back
tears as she left Downing Street after being ousted by her own party.
It was a bitter end for Thatcher's active political career - her family said she felt a keen sense of betrayal even years later.
In 1992, she was appointed in the House of Lords, taking the title Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven.
Thatcher
wrote several best-selling memoirs after leaving office and was a
frequent speaker on the international circuit before she suffered
several small strokes that in 2002 led her to curtail her lucrative
public speaking career.
Denis Thatcher died the following year; they had been married more than half a century.
Thatcher's
later years were marred by her son Mark Thatcher's murky involvement in
bankrolling a 2004 coup in Equatorial Guinea. He was fined and received
a suspended sentence for his role in the tawdry affair.
She
suffered from dementia in her final years, and her public appearances
became increasingly rare. British media reported that Thatcher had been
staying at the Ritz because her Belgravia home did not have an elevator
and she was having difficulty getting around.
She is survived by her two children, Mark Thatcher and Carol Thatcher, and her two grandchildren.
