This article was written by Michael White, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 8th April 2013 14.21 UTC
Margaret Thatcher, the most dominant British prime minister since Winston Churchill in 1940 and a global champion of the late 20th-century free market economic revival, has died.
Her spokesman, Lord Bell, said on Monday: “It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning. A further statement will be made later.”
Downing Street announced that she would receive a ceremonial funeral with military honours at St Paul’s Cathedral.
David Cameron, who is cutting short his trip to Europe to return to London following the news, said: “It was with great sadness that l learned of Lady Thatcher’s death. We’ve lost a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton.”
He told the BBC: “As our first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher succeeded against all the odds, and the real thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country, and I believe she will go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister.”
Buckingham Palace said the Queen was sad to hear the news and that she would be sending a private message of sympathy to the family.
The first woman elected to lead a major western state, Lady Thatcher, as she became after the longest premiership since 1827, served 11 unbroken years at No 10. She was only overthrown by an internal Tory party coup in 1990 after her reckless promotion of the poll tax led to rioting in Trafalgar Square.
Thatcher, who was 87, had been in declining health for some years, suffering from dementia. The death of Sir Denis Thatcher, her husband of 50 years and closest confidante, intensified her isolation in what had proved a frustrating retirement, despite energetic worldwide activity in the early years.
After a series of mini-strokes in 2002 Thatcher withdrew from public life, no longer able to make the kind of waspish pronouncements that had been her forte in office – and beyond.
Her death was greeted with tributes from across the political spectrum.
As Labour sources announced the party would suspend campaigning in the local election as a mark of respect, its leader, Ed Miliband, said: “She will be remembered as a unique figure. She reshaped the politics of a whole generation. She was Britain’s first woman prime minister. She moved the centre ground of British politics and was a huge figure on the world stage.
“The Labour party disagreed with much of what she did and she will always remain a controversial figure. But we can disagree and also greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength.”
The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said: “Margaret Thatcher was one of the defining figures in modern British politics. Whatever side of the political debate you stand on, no one can deny that as prime minister she left a unique and lasting imprint on the country she served.
“She may have divided opinion during her time in politics but everyone will be united today in acknowledging the strength of her personality and the radicalism of her politics.”
The work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, said: “Watching her set out to change Britain for the better in 1979 made me believe there was, at last, real purpose and real leadership in politics once again. She bestrode the political world like a colossus.”
The former prime minister Tony Blair said: “Margaret Thatcher was a towering political figure. Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world. Margaret was such a leader. Her global impact was vast. And some of the changes she made in Britain were, in certain respects at least, retained by the 1997 Labour government, and came to be implemented by governments around the world.”
Blair’s successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, said: “She will be remembered not only for being Britain’s first female prime minister and holding the office for 11 years, but also for the determination and resilience with which she carried out all her duties throughout her public life. Even those who disagreed with her never doubted the strength of her convictions and her unwavering belief in Britain’s destiny in the world.”
Describing her as a political phenomenon, the former Tory prime minister Sir John Major said: “Her outstanding characteristics will always be remembered by those who worked closely with her: courage and determination in politics, and humanity and generosity of spirit in private.”
The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: “Her memory will live long after the world has forgotten the grey suits of today’s politics.”
The “Iron Lady” proved a significant cold war ally of the US president Ronald Reagan in the final showdown with the Soviet Union, which broke up under reformist pressures led by Mikhail Gorbachev, a Kremlin leader with whom Thatcher famously declared she could “do business”.
As a result, many ordinary voters in ex-Soviet bloc states saw her as a bold champion of their liberty, a view widely shared across the spectrum of mainstream US opinion – though not at home or among key EU partners.
Thatcher was an unremarkable mid-ranking Conservative politician – known chiefly for being a “milk-snatching” education secretary under Edward Heath (1970-74) – until she unexpectedly overthrew her twice-defeated boss to become party leader in 1975.
Within a decade she had become known around the world – both admired and detested – for her pro-market domestic reforms and her implacable attitudes in foreign policy, including her long-running battle with the IRA, which almost managed to murder her when it placed a bomb in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in 1984.
At home the emerging doctrine of Thatcherism meant denationalisation of state-owned industry – the new word “privatisation” came into widespread use in many countries – and defeat of militant trade unionists, notably the National Union of Miners, whose year-long strike (1984-85) was bitter and traumatic.
Boosted by the newly arrived revenues from Britain’s North Sea oil fields, Thatcher had room to manoeuvre and change the ageing industrial economy in ways denied to postwar predecessors, and she used the opportunity to quell her enemies – including moderate “wets” in her own party and cabinet.
But she also deployed her notorious “handbaggings” in the European Union to obtain a British rebate – “my money” as she called it. She was less successful in fending off the centralising ambitions of the “Belgian empire”, her description of the European commission, especially in the years when it was headed by the French socialist Jacques Delors.
A further sign of her losing her grip came when Thatcher, long a sympathiser with the apartheid regime in South Africa against the liberation movement, dismissed Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.
Her allies in the tabloid press, notably Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, egged her on. And, as the British economy recovered from the severe recession that her monetarist medicine had inflicted on it – to tame the unions and cure inflation – she briefly seemed invincible.
But untrammelled power, with the defeat or retirement of allies who had kept her in check, led to mistakes and growing unpopularity. When Sir Geoffrey Howe, nominally her deputy, finally fell out with Thatcher – chiefly over Europe – his devastating resignation speech triggered Michael Heseltine’s leadership challenge.
It had been expected since he resigned as defence secretary over the Westland helicopter affair in 1986, Thatcher’s closest previous brush with political death.
Heseltine denied her outright victory in the first round of voting – then confined only to MPs – and she made way for Major rather than risk losing to him in the second ballot.
In retirement she wrote highly successful memoirs in two volumes and campaigned energetically on behalf of the Thatcher Foundation, which sought to promote her values – free markets and Anglo-Saxon liberties – around the world. Speaking engagements made her moderately wealthy and she made her final home in London’s Belgravia.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Who really wrote this rubbish? God forbid!!! and in a Valley Based media tool.
I suppose the younger members of the Valleys communities can be forgiven for believing some of this stuff now being written about her is true.
To say she `divided` communities is a gross under statement, she actually set in motion, deep poverty amongst the families working in the coal industry, eventual joblessness, dispair, and hopelessness,in some cases she set family against family, son against father, and brothers against brothers, her legacy systematically destroyed industries, and set in motion the current social housing shortage by selling off council houses and refusing to let Council`s spend the money raised on building new ones.
She created a crueller, nastier, and, a socially and class divided Country.
She did of course, NOT liberate society, she did NOT believe in `society`. She deliberately kept unemployment high, and the only thing families effected by that philosophy could do was to get used to the poverty it brought, and lets not forget she propped up apartheid states in South Africa, calling NELSON MANDELA a `TERRORIST` who should never be released from incarceration.
A frail old woman ( I refuse to call her a lady) has died, and her children and grandchildren have lost a mother and grandmother, but her death does not re-write history, unless you are a back slapping sycophant trying to re-balance the record of a lagacy which which is something to be ashamed of, and all those who say otherwise should hang their collective heads in shame.
Finally the newspapers are today saying that her funeral will replicate that of `Diana` I do not think so.
I'm no Royalist and don't agree with spending vast sums of public money on State or Ceremonial funerals but Princess Diana's public funeral wasn't a contentious issue back in 1997. With Margaret Thatcher however things are very different. It will be an outrage if up to £8m is spent on a Ceremonial funeral for the most divisive Prime Minister of the 20th Century. The public money squandered on this funeral should instead go back into the pit communities she and her government destroyed.
An Ex Prime Minister is no more than a private citizen. So quite why we should roll out the full pomp and farce of the establishment for Margaret Thatcher is baffling. In an age of austerity where we apparently have to cut support for the neediest in our society in various guises not least welfare but health and social care also. Then eight million for pageantry is quite frankly perverse and I would say as much for any Ex Prime Minister regardless of politics.
Are we to have a state funeral for Blair and Brown when their time comes too? Churchill as a wartime leader was a very obvious exception the exception being weakened and undermined by this ceremonial farce.
I agree with Helen on all counts, any measure of public money spent on this charade is delusional perversion.
The only war Thatcher fought was against her own people, starting with the miners. She certainly changed the nature of Britain destroying millions of communities and jobs in the process, and making it a poorer, weaker, more miserable country. As the song says "Ding Dong the witch is dead".