Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, the first woman to hold the office and the longest-serving of the twentieth century, and she reshaped the British economy and political vocabulary. Born in Grantham in 1925, the daughter of a grocer and Methodist lay preacher who was also mayor, she read chemistry at Oxford, worked as a research chemist, and then qualified as a barrister specialising in tax. She entered parliament in 1959, was education secretary from 1970, and won the Conservative leadership in 1975 against expectation. Her programme broke the postwar consensus. She cut income tax while raising VAT, abandoned full employment as a target in favour of controlling inflation through monetary policy, privatised British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, water and electricity, sold council houses to their tenants, and deregulated the City in the 1986 Big Bang. Unemployment passed three million, and manufacturing contracted sharply, concentrating the damage in the north, Scotland and Wales. She defeated the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984-85 strike after a year of confrontation, which ended the industrial power of the unions. The Falklands War in 1982, won in ten weeks after Argentina invaded, transformed her standing and delivered the 1983 election. She survived the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984. She built a close alliance with Ronald Reagan and judged Mikhail Gorbachev a man she could do business with. The poll tax, a flat local charge introduced in 1989-90, produced riots and revolt in her own party, and her hostility to European integration split the cabinet. She resigned in November 1990. She died in 2013.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 2013 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1979–90)
