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Margaret Thatcher

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Political People

   The Rt Hon. Margaret Thatcher
   Margaret Thatcher
     __________________________________________________________________

   Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
   In office
   4 May 1979 –  28 November 1990
   Monarch Elizabeth II
   Deputy William Whitelaw (1979 - 1988)
   Geoffrey Howe (1989 - 1990)
   Preceded by James Callaghan
   Succeeded by John Major
     __________________________________________________________________

   Born 13 October 1925 (1925-10-13) (age 81)
   Flag of England Grantham, Lincolnshire, England
   Political party Conservative
   Spouse Sir Denis Thatcher, Bt.
   Alma mater Somerville College, Oxford
   Profession Research chemist, Lawyer
   Religion Methodist
   Signature

   Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC (born Margaret
   Hilda Roberts on 13 October 1925) is a former Prime Minister of the
   United Kingdom, in office from 1979 to 1990. She was leader of the
   Conservative Party from 1975 until 1990. She is the only woman to have
   held the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Thatcher was
   the longest-serving British Prime Minister since Lord Salisbury and had
   the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the
   early 19th century. She was the first woman to lead a major political
   party in the UK, and the first of only two women to have held any of
   the four great offices of state.

Early life and education

   Thatcher was born in the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, England. Her
   father, Alfred Roberts, owned a grocer's shop in the town and was
   active in local politics and religion, serving as an Alderman and
   Methodist lay preacher. Roberts came from a Liberal family but stood—as
   was then customary in local government—as an Independent. He lost his
   post as Alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority
   on Grantham Council in 1950. He married Beatrice Roberts, née
   Stephenson, and they had two daughters (Thatcher and her older sister
   Muriel (1921-2004)). Thatcher was brought up a devout Methodist and has
   remained a Christian throughout her life. Thatcher performed well
   academically, attending Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School and
   subsequently attending Somerville College, Oxford in 1944 to study
   Chemistry, specifically crystallography. She became President of the
   Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946, the third woman to
   hold the post. She graduated with a degree and worked as a research
   chemist for British Xylonite and then J. Lyons and Co., where she
   helped develop methods for preserving ice cream. She was a member of
   the team that developed the first soft frozen ice cream. Thatcher was
   also a member of the Association of Scientific Workers.

Political career between 1950 and 1970

   At the 1950 and 1951 elections, Margaret Roberts fought the safe Labour
   seat of Dartford, and was at the time the youngest ever female
   Conservative candidate for office. While active in the Conservative
   Party in Kent, she met Denis Thatcher, whom she married in 1951. Denis
   was a wealthy divorced businessman and he funded his wife's studies for
   the Bar. She qualified as a barrister in 1953, the same year that her
   twin children Carol and Mark were born. As a lawyer she specialised in
   tax law.

   Thatcher then began to look for a safe Conservative seat and was
   narrowly rejected as candidate for Orpington in 1954. She had several
   other rejections before being selected for Finchley in April 1958. She
   won the seat easily in the 1959 election and took her seat in the House
   of Commons. Unusually, her maiden speech was in support of her Private
   Member's Bill ( Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960) to
   force local councils to hold meetings in public, which was successful.
   In 1961 she went against the Conservative Party's official position by
   voting for the restoration of birching.

   She was given early promotion to the front bench as Parliamentary
   Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in
   September 1961, retaining the post until the Conservatives lost power
   in the 1964 election. When Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down Thatcher
   voted for Edward Heath in the leadership election over Reginald
   Maudling, and was rewarded with the job of Conservative spokesman on
   Housing and Land. In this role she adopted the policy of allowing
   tenants to buy their Council Houses, an idea first developed by her
   colleague James Allason. The policy would prove popular. She moved to
   the Shadow Treasury team after 1966.

   Thatcher was one of few Conservative MPs to support Leo Abse's Bill to
   decriminalise male homosexuality, and she voted in favour of David
   Steel's Bill to legalise abortion. She supported retention of capital
   punishment and voted against loosening the divorce laws. Thatcher made
   her mark as a conference speaker in 1966, with a strong attack on the
   high-tax policies of the Labour Government as being steps "not only
   towards Socialism, but towards Communism". She won promotion to the
   Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Fuel Spokesman in 1967, and was then promoted
   to shadow Transport and, finally, Education before the 1970 election.

In Heath's Cabinet

   When the Conservative party under Edward Heath won the 1970 general
   election, Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education and Science.
   In her first months in office, forced to administer a cut in the
   Education budget, she was responsible for the abolition of universal
   free milk for school-children aged seven to eleven (Labour had already
   abolished it for secondary schools). This provoked a storm of public
   protest, and led to one of the more unflattering names for her:
   "Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher". However, papers later released
   under the Thirty Year Rule show that she spoke against such a move in
   Cabinet, but was forced, due to the concept of collective
   responsibility, to implement the will of her fellow ministers. She also
   successfully resisted the introduction of library book charges.

   Her term was marked by support for several proposals for more local
   education authorities to close grammar schools and adopt comprehensive
   secondary education, even though this was widely perceived as a
   left-wing policy. Thatcher also saved the Open University from being
   abolished. The Chancellor Anthony Barber actually wanted to abolish it
   as a budget-cutting measure, for he viewed it as a gimmick by Harold
   Wilson. Thatcher believed it was a relatively inexpensive way of
   extending higher education and insisted that the University should
   experiment with admitting school-leavers as well as adults. In her
   memoirs, Thatcher wrote that she was not part of Heath's inner circle,
   and had little or no influence on the key government decisions outside
   her department.

   After the Conservative defeat in February 1974, Heath appointed her
   Shadow Environment Secretary. In this position she promised to abolish
   the rating system that paid for local government services, which proved
   a popular policy within the Conservative Party.

As Leader of the Opposition

   Margaret Thatcher as Leader of the Opposition in 1975
   Margaret Thatcher as Leader of the Opposition in 1975

   Thatcher agreed with Sir Keith Joseph and the CPS that the Heath
   Government had lost control of monetary policy — and had lost direction
   — following its 1972 U-turn. After her party lost the second election
   of 1974, Joseph decided to challenge Heath's leadership but later
   withdrew. Thatcher then decided that she would enter the race on behalf
   of the Josephite/CPS faction. Unexpectedly she out-polled Heath on the
   first ballot, forcing him to resign the leadership. On the second
   ballot, she defeated Heath's preferred successor William Whitelaw, by
   146 votes to 79, and became Conservative Party leader on 11 February
   1975. She appointed Whitelaw as her deputy. Heath remained bitter
   towards Thatcher to the end of his life for what he perceived as her
   disloyalty in standing against him.

   On 19 January 1976, she made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which
   she made a scathing attack on the Soviet Union. The most famous part of
   her speech ran:

     "The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly
     acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the
     world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry
     about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before
     butter, while we put just about everything before guns."

   In response, the Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda ("
   Red Star") gave her the nickname " Iron Lady", which was soon
   publicised by Radio Moscow. She took delight in the name and it soon
   became associated with her image as having an unwavering and steadfast
   character. Her reaction to her other chief nickname, "Attila the Hen"
   (thought to have been coined by Tory grandee Sir Ian Gilmour) is
   unrecorded.

   Thatcher appointed many Heath supporters to the Shadow Cabinet, for she
   had won the leadership as an outsider and had little power base of her
   own within the party. One, James Prior got the vital brief of shadow
   Employment Secretary. Thatcher had to act cautiously to convert the
   Conservative Party to her monetarist beliefs. She reversed Heath's
   support for devolved government for Scotland. In an interview for
   Granada Television's World in Action programme in January 1978, she
   said "people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather
   swamped by people with a different culture", arousing particular
   controversy at the time. She received 10,000 letters thanking her for
   raising the subject and the Conservatives gained a lead against Labour
   in the opinion polls, from both parties at 43% before the speech to 48%
   for Conservative and 39% for Labour immediately after.

   The Labour Government ran into difficulties with the industrial
   disputes, strikes, high unemployment, and collapsing public services
   during the winter of 1978-9, dubbed the ' Winter of Discontent'. The
   Conservatives used campaign posters with slogans such as "Labour Isn't
   Working" to attack the government's record over unemployment and its
   over-regulation of the labour market.

   James Callaghan's Labour government fell after a successful Motion of
   No Confidence in spring 1979.

   In the run up to the 1979 General Election, most opinion polls showed
   that voters preferred James Callaghan as Prime Minister even as the
   Conservative Party maintained a lead in the polls. The Conservatives
   would go on to win a 44-seat majority in the House of Commons and
   Margaret Thatcher became the United Kingdom's first female Prime
   Minister. On arriving at 10 Downing Street, she famously said, in a
   paraphrase of St. Francis of Assisi:

   “  Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error,
     may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where
                      there is despair, may we bring hope.                  ”

As Prime Minister

1979–1983

   Thatcher became Prime Minister on 4 May 1979, with a mandate to reverse
   the UK's economic decline and to reduce the role of the state in the
   economy. Thatcher was incensed by one contemporary view within the
   Civil Service, that its job was to manage the UK's decline from the
   days of Empire, and she wanted the country to assert a higher level of
   influence and leadership in international affairs. She was a
   philosophic soul-mate of Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 in the United
   States, and to a lesser extent Brian Mulroney, who was elected in 1984
   in Canada. Conservatism now became the dominant political philosophy in
   the major English-speaking nations, apart from Australia. In contrast
   her relationship with Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke was rather
   strained due to their contrasting views on South Africa and the
   Commonwealth (Hawke was a republican), and Thatcher did not endorse
   previous Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser as Secretary General
   of the Commonwealth.

   In May 1980, one day before she was due to meet the Irish Taoiseach,
   Charles Haughey, to discuss Northern Ireland, she announced in the
   House of Commons that "the future of the constitutional affairs of
   Northern Ireland is a matter for the people of Northern Ireland, this
   government, this parliament, and no-one else."

   In 1981, a number of Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Irish
   National Liberation Army prisoners in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison
   (known in Northern Ireland as 'Long Kesh', its previous official name)
   went on hunger strike to regain the status of political prisoners,
   which had been revoked five years earlier under the preceding Labour
   government. Bobby Sands, the first of the strikers, was elected as a
   Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Fermanagh and South
   Tyrone a few weeks before he died.

   Thatcher refused at first to countenance a return to political status
   for republican prisoners, famously declaring "Crime is crime is crime;
   it is not political." However, after nine more men had starved
   themselves to death and the strike had ended, some rights relating to
   political status were restored to paramilitary prisoners.

   Thatcher's public hard line on the treatment of paramilitaries was
   reinforced during the 1981 Iranian Embassy Siege where for the first
   time in 70 years British armed forces were authorised to use lethal
   force in Great Britain.

   Thatcher also continued the policy of " Ulsterisation" of the previous
   Labour government and its Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Roy
   Mason, believing that the Unionists of Northern Ireland should be at
   the forefront in combating Irish republicanism. This meant relieving
   the burden on the mainstream British army and elevating the role of the
   Ulster Defence Regiment and the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

   As a monetarist, Thatcher started out in her economic policy by
   increasing interest rates to slow the growth of the money supply and
   thus lower inflation. She had a preference for indirect taxation over
   taxes on income, and value added tax (VAT) was raised sharply to 15%,
   with a resultant actual short-term rise in inflation. These moves hit
   businesses -- especially the manufacturing sector -- and unemployment
   quickly passed two million, doubling the one million unemployed under
   the previous Labour government.

   Political commentators harked back to the Heath Government's "U-turn"
   and speculated that Mrs Thatcher would follow suit, but she repudiated
   this approach at the 1980 Conservative Party conference, telling the
   party: "To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media
   catch-phrase—the U-turn—I have only one thing to say: you turn if you
   want to; the Lady's not for turning." That she meant what she said was
   confirmed in the 1981 budget, when, despite concerns expressed in an
   open letter from 364 leading economists, taxes were increased in the
   middle of a recession. In January 1982, the inflation rate had dropped
   back to 8.6% from earlier highs of 18%, and interest rates were then
   allowed to fall. Unemployment continued to rise, reaching an official
   figure of 3.6 million — although the criteria for defining who was
   unemployed were amended allowing some to estimate that unemployment in
   fact hit 5 million. However, Norman Tebbit has suggested that, due to
   the high number of people claiming unemployment benefit whilst working,
   unemployment never reached three million. By 1983, manufacturing output
   had dropped 30% from 1978.

The Falklands

   On 2 April 1982, a ruling military junta in Argentina invaded the
   Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory that Argentina had
   claimed since an 1830s dispute on their British settlement. Within days
   Thatcher sent a naval task force to recapture the islands. Despite the
   huge logistical difficulties the operation was a success, resulting in
   a wave of patriotic enthusiasm and support for her government at a time
   when Thatcher's popularity had been at an all-time low for a serving
   Prime Minister, with The Sun newspaper declaring "The Empire Strikes
   Back".

1983 General Election

   The 'Falklands Factor', along with an economic recovery in early 1983,
   bolstered the government's popularity. The Labour party at this time
   had split, and there was a new challenge in the SDP-Liberal Alliance,
   formed by an electoral pact between the Social Democratic Party and the
   Liberal Party. However, this grouping failed to make its intended
   breakthrough, despite briefly holding an opinion poll lead. In the June
   1983 general election, the Conservatives won 42.4% of the vote, the
   Labour party 27.6% and the Alliance 25.4% of the vote. Although the
   Conservatives' share of the vote had fallen slightly (1.5%) since 1979,
   Labour's vote had fallen by far more (9.3%) and in Britain's first past
   the post system, the Conservatives won a landslide victory. Under
   Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives now had an overall majority of 144
   MPs.

1983–1987

   Thatcher was committed to reducing the power of the trades unions but,
   unlike the Heath government, adopted a strategy of incremental change
   rather than a single Act. Several unions launched strikes in response,
   but these actions eventually collapsed. Gradually, Thatcher's reforms
   reduced the power and influence of the unions. The changes were chiefly
   focused upon preventing the recurrence of the large-scale industrial
   actions of the 1970s, but were also intended to ensure that the
   consequences for the participants would be severe if any future action
   was taken. The reforms were also aimed, Thatcher claimed, to
   democratise the unions, and return power to the members. The most
   significant measures were to make secondary industrial action illegal,
   to force union leadership to first win a ballot of the union membership
   before calling a strike, and to abolish the closed shop. Further laws
   banned workplace ballots and imposed postal ballots.

   The confrontation over strikes carried out in 1984-85 by the National
   Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in opposition to proposals to close a large
   number of mines proved decisive. The government had made preparations
   to counter a strike by the NUM long in advance by building up coal
   stocks, ensuring that cuts in the electricity supply — the legacy of
   the industrial disputes of 1972 — would not be repeated.

   Police tactics during the strikes came under criticism from civil
   libertarians, but the images of crowds of militant miners attempting to
   prevent other miners from working proved a shock even to some
   supporters of the strikes. The mounting desperation and poverty of the
   striking families led to divisions within the regional NUM branches,
   and a breakaway union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM), was
   soon formed. A group of workers, resigned to the impending failure of
   the actions and worn down by months of protests, began to defy the
   Union's rulings, starting splinter groups and advising workers that
   returning to work was the only viable option.

   The Miners' Strike lasted a full year before the NUM leadership
   conceded without a deal. The Conservative government proceeded to close
   all but 15 of the country's pits, with the remaining 15 being sold off
   and privatised in 1994. Private companies have since then acquired
   licences to open new pits and open-cast sites, with the majority of the
   original mines destroyed and the land redeveloped. The defeat of the
   miners' strike led to a long period of demoralization in the whole of
   the trade union movement.

   At the end of March 1984, four South Africans were arrested in
   Coventry, remanded in custody, and charged with contravening the UN
   arms embargo, which prohibited exports to apartheid South Africa of
   military equipment. Mrs Thatcher took a personal interest in the
   Coventry Four, and 10 Downing Street requested daily summaries of the
   case from the prosecuting authority, HM Customs and Excise. Within a
   month, the Coventry Four had been freed from jail and allowed to travel
   to South Africa – on condition that they returned to England for their
   trial later that year. In April 1984, Thatcher sent senior British
   diplomat, Sir John Leahy, to negotiate the release of 16 Britons who
   had been taken hostage by the Angolan rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi. At
   the time, Savimbi's UNITA guerrilla movement was financed and supported
   militarily by the apartheid regime of South Africa. On April 26, 1984
   Leahy succeeded in securing the release of the British hostages at the
   UNITA base in Jamba, Angola. In June 1984 Thatcher invited apartheid
   South Africa's president, P. W. Botha, and foreign minister, Pik Botha,
   to Chequers in an effort to stave off growing international pressure
   for the imposition of economic sanctions against South Africa, where
   Britain had invested heavily. She reportedly urged President Botha to
   end apartheid; to release Nelson Mandela; to halt the harassment of
   black dissidents; to stop the bombing of African National Congress
   (ANC) bases in front-line states; and to comply with UN Security
   Council resolutions and withdraw from Namibia. However Botha ignored
   these demands. In an interview with Hugo Young for The Guardian in July
   1986, Thatcher expressed her belief that economic sanctions against
   South Africa would be immoral because they would make thousands of
   black workers unemployed. In August 1984, foreign minister, Pik Botha,
   decided not to allow the Coventry Four to return to stand trial,
   thereby forfeiting £200,000 bail money put up by the South African
   embassy in London. The Coventry Four affair, and Mrs Thatcher's alleged
   involvement in it, would hit the headlines four years later when
   British diplomat, Patrick Haseldine, wrote a letter to the Guardian
   newspaper.

   On the early morning of 12 October 1984, the day before her 59th
   birthday, Thatcher escaped injury in the Brighton hotel bombing during
   the Conservative Party Conference when her hotel room was bombed by the
   Provisional Irish Republican Army. Five people died in the attack,
   including Roberta Wakeham, wife of the government's Chief Whip John
   Wakeham, and the Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry. A prominent member
   of the Cabinet, Norman Tebbit, was injured, and his wife Margaret was
   left paralysed. Thatcher herself would have been injured if not for the
   fact that she was delayed from using the bathroom (which suffered more
   damage than the room she was in at the time the IRA bomb detonated).
   Thatcher insisted that the conference open on time the next day and
   made her speech as planned in defiance of the bombers, a gesture which
   won widespread approval across the political spectrum.

   On 15 November 1985, Thatcher signed the Hillsborough Anglo-Irish
   Agreement with Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, the first time a
   British government gave the Republic of Ireland a say (albeit advisory)
   in the governance of Northern Ireland. The agreement was greeted with
   fury by Northern Irish unionists. The Ulster Unionists and Democratic
   Unionists made an electoral pact and on 23 January 1986, staged an
   ad-hoc referendum by resigning their seats and contesting the
   subsequent by-elections, losing only one, to the nationalist Social
   Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). However, unlike the Sunningdale
   Agreement of 1974, they found they could not bring the agreement down
   by a general strike. This was another effect of the changed balance of
   power in industrial relations.

   Thatcher's political and economic philosophy emphasised reduced state
   intervention, free markets, and entrepreneurialism. Since gaining
   power, she had experimented in selling off a small nationalised
   company, the National Freight Company, to its workers, with a
   surprisingly positive response. After the 1983 election, the Government
   became bolder and, starting with British Telecom, sold off most of the
   large utilities which had been in public ownership since the late
   1940s. Many people took advantage of share offers, although many sold
   their shares immediately for a quick profit and therefore the
   proportion of shares held by individuals rather than institutions did
   not increase. The policy of privatisation, while anathema to many on
   the left, has become synonymous with Thatcherism and has also been
   followed by Tony Blair's government. Wider share-ownership and council
   house sales became known as " popular capitalism" to its supporters (a
   term coined by John Redwood). By 1987, inflation had fallen further to
   4.2%.
   Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at Camp David, 1986.
   Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at Camp David, 1986.

   In the Cold War, Mrs. Thatcher supported United States President Ronald
   Reagan's policies of deterrence against the Soviets. This contrasted
   with the policy of détente which the West had pursued during the 1970s,
   and caused friction with allies who still adhered to the idea of
   détente. US forces were permitted by Mrs. Thatcher to station nuclear
   cruise missiles at British bases, arousing mass protests by the
   Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. However, she later was the first
   Western leader to respond warmly to the rise of the future reformist
   Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, declaring that she liked him and
   describing him as "a man we can do business with" after a meeting in
   1984, three months before he came to power. This was a start of a move
   by the West back to a new détente with the USSR under Gorbachev's
   leadership, which coincided with the final erosion of Soviet power
   prior to its eventual collapse in 1991. Thatcher outlasted the Cold
   War, which ended in 1989, and those who share her views on it credit
   her with a part in the West's victory, by both the deterrence and
   détente postures.

   In 1985, as a deliberate snub, the University of Oxford voted to refuse
   her an honorary degree in protest against her cuts in funding for
   higher education. This award had always previously been given to all
   Prime Ministers who had been educated at Oxford.

   In the aftermath of a series of terrorist attacks on U.S. military
   personnel in Europe, which were believed to have been executed at
   Colonel Qaddafi's command, President Reagan decided to carry out a
   bombing raid on Libya. Both France and Spain refused to allow U.S.
   aircraft to fly over their territory for the raid. Thatcher herself had
   earlier expressed opposition to "retaliatory strikes that are against
   international law" and had not followed the U.S. in an embargo of
   Libyan oil. However Thatcher felt that as the U.S. had given support to
   Britain during the Falklands War but she had opposed the U.S. invasion
   of Grenada and that America was a major ally against a possible Soviet
   attack in Western Europe, she felt obliged to allow U.S. aircraft to
   use bases situated in Britain. Later that year in America, President
   Reagan persuaded Congress to approve of an extradition treaty which
   closed a legal loophole by which IRA members/ Volunteers escaped
   extradition by claiming their murders were "political". This had been
   previously opposed by Irish-Americans for years but was passed after
   Reagan used Thatcher's support in the Libyan raid as a reason to pass
   it.

   Her liking for defence ties with the United States was demonstrated in
   the Westland affair when she acted with colleagues to allow the
   helicopter manufacturer Westland, a vital defence contractor, to refuse
   to link with the Italian firm Agusta in order for it to link with the
   management's preferred option, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation of the
   United States. Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, who had pushed the
   Agusta deal, resigned in protest after this, and remained an
   influential critic and potential leadership challenger. He would
   eventually prove instrumental in Thatcher's fall in 1990.

   In 1986, her government controversially abolished the Greater London
   Council (GLC), then led by the strongly left-wing Ken Livingstone, and
   six Metropolitan County Councils (MCCs). The government claimed this
   was an efficiency measure. However, Thatcher's opponents held that the
   move was politically motivated, as all of the abolished councils were
   controlled by Labour, had become powerful centres of opposition to her
   government, and were in favour of higher local government taxes and
   public spending. Several of them had however rendered themselves
   politically vulnerable by committing scarce public funds to causes
   widely seen as political and even extreme.

   Thatcher had two notable foreign policy successes in her second term.
     * In 1984, she visited China and signed the Sino-British Joint
       Declaration with Deng Xiaoping on 19 December, which committed the
       People's Republic of China to award Hong Kong the status of a
       "Special Administrative Region". Under the terms of the One
       Country, Two Systems agreement, China was obliged to leave Hong
       Kong's economic status unchanged after the handover on 1 July 1997
       for a period of fifty years – until 2047.
     * At the Dublin European Council in November 1979, Mrs. Thatcher
       argued that the United Kingdom paid far more to the European
       Economic Community than it received in spending. She famously
       declared at the summit: "We are not asking the Community or anyone
       else for money. We are simply asking to have our own money back".
       Her arguments were successful and at the June 1984 Fontainbleau
       Summit, the EEC agreed on an annual rebate for the United Kingdom,
       amounting to 66% of the difference between Britain's EU
       contributions and receipts. This still remains in effect, although
       Tony Blair later agreed to significantly reduce the size of the
       rebate. It periodically causes political controversy among the
       members of the European Union.

1987–1990

   By leading her party to victory in the 1987 general election with a 102
   seat majority, riding an economic boom against a weak Labour opposition
   advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament, Margaret Thatcher became the
   longest continuously serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since
   Lord Liverpool (1812 to 1827), and the first to win three successive
   elections since Lord Palmerston in 1865. Most United Kingdom newspapers
   supported her—with the exception of The Daily Mirror, The Guardian and
   The Independent—and were rewarded with regular press briefings by her
   press secretary, Bernard Ingham. She was known as "Maggie" in the
   tabloids, and her opponents chanted the well-known protest slogan "
   Maggie Out!". Her unpopularity on the left is evident from the lyrics
   of several contemporary pop-music songs (see below: Margaret Thatcher
   in popular culture)

   Though an early backer of decriminalization of male homosexuality (see
   above), Thatcher, at the 1987 Conservative party conference, issued the
   statement that "Children who need to be taught to respect traditional
   moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be
   gay". Backbench Conservative MPs and Peers had already begun a backlash
   against the 'promotion' of homosexuality and, in December 1987, the
   controversial ' Section 28' was added as an amendment to what became
   the Local Government Act 1988. This legislation has since been
   abolished by Tony Blair's Labour administration.

   Welfare reforms in her third term created an adult Employment Training
   system that included full-time work done for the dole plus a £10
   top-up, on the workfare model from the US.

   Thatcher, the former chemist, became publicly concerned with
   environmental issues in the late 1980s. In 1988, she made a major
   speech accepting the problems of global warming, ozone depletion and
   acid rain. In 1990, she opened the Hadley Centre for climate prediction
   and research. . In her book Statecraft (2002), she described her later
   regret in supporting the concept of human-induced global warming,
   outlining the negative effects she perceived it had upon the
   policy-making process. "Whatever international action we agree upon to
   deal with environmental problems, we must enable our economies to grow
   and develop, because without growth you cannot generate the wealth
   required to pay for the protection of the environment" .

   At Bruges, Belgium, in 1988, Thatcher made a speech in which she
   outlined her opposition to proposals from the European Community for a
   federal structure and increasing centralisation of decision-making.
   Although she had supported British membership, Thatcher believed that
   the role of the EC should be limited to ensuring free trade and
   effective competition, and feared that new EC regulations would reverse
   the changes she was making in the UK. "We have not successfully rolled
   back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed
   at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new
   dominance from Brussels". She was specifically against Economic and
   Monetary Union, through which a single currency would replace national
   currencies, and for which the EC was making preparations. The speech
   caused an outcry from other European leaders, and exposed for the first
   time the deep split that was emerging over European policy inside her
   Conservative Party.

   Thatcher's popularity once again declined, in 1989, as the economy
   suffered from high interest rates imposed to temper a potentially
   unsustainable boom. She blamed her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who had
   been following an economic policy which was a preparation for monetary
   union; in an interview for the Financial Times, in November 1987,
   Thatcher claimed not to have been told of this and did not approve.

   At a meeting before the Madrid European Community summit in June 1989,
   Lawson and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe forced Thatcher to agree to
   the circumstances under which she would join the Exchange Rate
   Mechanism, a preparation for monetary union and the abolishment of the
   Pound Sterling. At the meeting, they both claimed they would resign if
   their demands were not met. Thatcher responded by demoting Howe and by
   listening more to her adviser Sir Alan Walters on economic matters.
   Lawson resigned that October, feeling that Thatcher had undermined him.

   That November, Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the
   Conservative Party by Sir Anthony Meyer. As Meyer was a virtually
   unknown backbench MP, he was viewed as a " stalking horse" candidate
   for more prominent members of the party. Thatcher easily defeated
   Meyer's challenge, but there were sixty ballot papers either cast for
   Meyer or abstaining, a surprisingly large number for a sitting Prime
   Minister. Her supporters in the Party, however, viewed the results as a
   success, claiming that after ten years as Prime Minister and with
   approximately 370 Conservative MPs voting, the opposition was
   surprisingly small.

   Thatcher's new system to replace local government taxes, outlined in
   the Conservative manifesto for the 1987 election, was introduced in
   Scotland in 1989 and in England and Wales in 1990. The rates were
   replaced by the Community Charge (more widely known as the " poll
   tax"), which applied the same amount to every individual resident, with
   discounts for low earners. This was to be the most universally
   unpopular policy of her premiership and had the effect of limiting the
   number of people on the electoral register.

   Additional problems emerged when many of the tax rates set by local
   councils proved to be much higher than earlier predicted. Opponents of
   the Community Charge banded together to resist bailiffs and disrupt
   court hearings of Community Charge debtors. The Labour MP, Terry
   Fields, was jailed for 60 days for refusing on principle to pay his
   Community Charge. As the Prime Minister continued to refuse to
   compromise on the tax, up to 18 million people refused to pay,
   enforcement measures became increasingly draconian, and unrest mounted
   and culminated in a number of riots. The most serious of these happened
   in London on 31 March 1990, during a protest at Trafalgar Square,
   London, which more than 200,000 protesters attended. The huge
   unpopularity of the tax was seen as a major factor in Thatcher's
   downfall.

   One of Thatcher's final acts in office was to put pressure on US
   President George H. W. Bush to deploy troops to the Middle East to
   drive Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait. Bush was somewhat
   apprehensive about the plan, but Thatcher famously told him that this
   was "no time to go wobbly!"

   On the Friday before the Conservative Party conference in October 1990,
   Thatcher ordered her new Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major to
   reduce interest rates by 1%. Major persuaded her that the only way to
   maintain monetary stability was to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism at
   the same time, despite not meeting the 'Madrid conditions'. The
   Conservative Party conference that year saw a large degree of unity;
   few who attended could have imagined that Mrs Thatcher had only a
   matter of weeks left in office.

Fall from power

   Mrs. Thatcher's political "assassination" was, according to witnesses
   such as Alan Clark, one of the most dramatic episodes in British
   political history. The idea of a long-serving prime minister —
   undefeated at the polls — being ousted by an internal party ballot
   might at first sight seem bizarre. However, by 1990, opposition to
   Thatcher's policies on local government taxation, her Government's
   perceived mishandling of the economy (in particular the high interest
   rates of 15% that eroded her support among home owners and business
   people), and the divisions opening in the Conservative Party over
   European integration made her seem increasingly politically vulnerable
   and her party increasingly divided. Her distaste for consensus politics
   and willingness to override colleagues' opinions, including that of
   Cabinet, emboldened the backlash against her when it did occur.

   On 1 November 1990, Sir Geoffrey Howe, one of Thatcher's oldest and
   staunchest supporters, resigned from his position as Deputy Prime
   Minister in protest at Thatcher's European policy. In his resignation
   speech in the House of Commons two weeks later, he suggested that the
   time had come for "others to consider their own response to the tragic
   conflict of loyalties" with which he stated that he had wrestled for
   perhaps too long. Her former cabinet colleague Michael Heseltine
   subsequently challenged her for the leadership of the party, and
   attracted sufficient support in the first round of voting to prolong
   the contest to a second ballot. Though she initially stated that she
   intended to contest the second ballot, Thatcher decided, after
   consulting with her Cabinet colleagues, to withdraw from the contest.
   On 22 November, at just after 9.30 a.m., she announced to the Cabinet
   that she would not be a candidate in the second ballot. Shortly
   afterwards, her staff made public what was, in effect, her resignation
   statement:

   “ Having consulted widely among my colleagues, I have concluded that
        the unity of the Party and the prospects of victory in a General
        Election would be better served if I stood down to enable Cabinet
       colleagues to enter the ballot for the leadership. I should like to
     thank all those in Cabinet and outside who have given me such dedicated
                                    support.                                ”

   Neil Kinnock, Leader of the Opposition, proposed a motion of no
   confidence in the government, and Margaret Thatcher seized the
   opportunity this presented on the day of her resignation to deliver one
   of her most memorable performances:

   “ ...a single currency is about the politics of Europe, it is about a
      federal Europe by the back door. So I shall consider the proposal of
     the Honourable Member for Bolsover ( Mr. Skinner). Now where were we? I
                               am enjoying this."                           ”

   She supported John Major as her successor and he duly won the
   leadership contest, although in the years to come her approval of Major
   would fall away. After her resignation a MORI poll found that 52%
   agreed that "On balance she had been good for the country", with 48%
   agreeing that she had been "bad". In 1991, she was given a long and
   unprecedented standing ovation at the party's annual conference,
   although she politely rejected calls from delegates for her to make a
   speech. She did, however, occasionally speak in the House of Commons
   after she was Prime Minister. She retired from the House at the 1992
   election, at the age of 66 years. Her continued presence in the House
   of Commons after the resignation was thought to be a destabilising
   influence on the Conservative government.

Post-political career

   In 1992, Margaret Thatcher was raised to the House of Lords by the
   conferment of a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the
   County of Lincolnshire. She did not take an hereditary title, as she
   had recommended for Harold Macmillan, later Earl of Stockton, on his
   ninetieth birthday in 1984. She has explained that she thought she
   hadn't sufficient financial means to support an hereditary title. By
   virtue of the life barony, she entered the House of Lords. She made a
   series of speeches in the Lords criticising the Maastricht Treaty,
   describing it as "a treaty too far" and in June 1993 told the Lords: "I
   could never have signed this treaty". She had also advocated a
   referendum on the treaty when she returned to the backbenches in 1991,
   citing A. V. Dicey, since all three main parties were in favour of it
   and that therefore the people should have their say.

   In August 1992, she called for NATO to stop the Serbian assault on
   Gorazde and Sarajevo in order to end ethnic cleansing and to preserve
   the Bosnian state. She claimed what was happening in Bosnia was
   "reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Nazis". In December of that
   same year she warned that there could be a "holocaust" in Bosnia and,
   after the first massacre at Srebrenica in April 1993, Thatcher thought
   it was a "killing field the like of which I thought we would never see
   in Europe again". She reportedly said to Douglas Hurd, the Foreign
   Secretary: "Douglas, Douglas, you would make Neville Chamberlain look
   like a warmonger".

   Margaret Thatcher had already been honoured by the Queen in 1990,
   shortly after her resignation as Prime Minister, when awarded the Order
   of Merit, one of the UK's highest distinctions. In addition, her
   husband, Denis Thatcher, had been given a baronetcy in 1991 (ensuring
   that their son Mark would inherit a title). This was the first creation
   of a baronetcy since 1965. In 1995, Thatcher was raised to the Order of
   the Garter, the United Kingdom's highest order of Chivalry.

   In July 1992, she was hired by tobacco company Philip Morris Companies,
   now the Altria Group, as a "geopolitical consultant" for US$250,000 per
   year and an annual contribution of US$250,000 to her Foundation.

   From 1993 to 2000, she served as Chancellor of the College of William
   and Mary, Virginia, USA, which was established by Royal Charter in
   1693. She was also Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, the UK's
   only private university. She retired from the post in 1998.

   She wrote her memoirs in two volumes, The Path to Power and The Downing
   Street Years. In 1993 The Downing Street Years were turned into a
   documentary series by the BBC, in which she described the Cabinet
   rebellion that brought about her resignation as "treachery with a smile
   on its face".

   Although she remained supportive in public, in private she made her
   displeasure with many of John Major's policies plain, and her views
   were conveyed to the press and widely reported. She was critical of the
   rise in public spending under Major, his tax increases, and his support
   of the European Union. After Tony Blair's election as Labour Party
   leader in 1994, Thatcher gave an interview in May 1995 in which she
   praised Blair as "probably the most formidable Labour leader since Hugh
   Gaitskell. I see a lot of socialism behind their front bench, but not
   in Mr Blair. I think he genuinely has moved".

   In the Conservative leadership election in the aftermath of the
   Conservatives' landslide defeat at the hands of New Labour, Thatcher
   voiced her support for William Hague after Kenneth Clarke entered into
   an alliance with John Redwood. Thatcher reportedly then toured the tea
   room of the House of Commons, urging Conservative MPs to vote for
   Hague.

   In 1998, Thatcher made a controversial visit to the former Chilean
   dictator Augusto Pinochet, while he was under house arrest in Surrey.
   Pinochet was fighting extradition for human rights abuses committed
   during his tenure as President. Thatcher expressed her support and
   friendship . She remembered that Pinochet had been a key ally of
   Britain during the Falklands War but preferred to forget the tyranny,
   torture and mass-murder committed by his regime. Also in 1998, she made
   a £2,000,000 donation to Cambridge University for the endowment of a
   Margaret Thatcher Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies. She also donated
   the archive of her personal papers to Churchill College, Cambridge
   where the collection continues to be expanded.

   Margaret Thatcher actively supported the Conservative general election
   campaign in 2001. In the Conservative leadership election shortly
   after, Lady Thatcher came out in support of Iain Duncan Smith because
   she believed he would "make infinitely the better leader" than Kenneth
   Clarke due to Clarke's "old-fashioned views of the role of the state
   and his unbounded enthusiasm for European integration".

   In 2002, she published Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World
   detailing her thoughts on international relations since her resignation
   in 1990. The chapters on the European Union were particularly
   controversial; she called for a fundamental renegotiation of Britain's
   membership to preserve the UK's sovereignty and, if that failed, for
   Britain to leave and join NAFTA. These chapters were serialised in The
   Times on Monday, 18 March and caused a political furor for the rest of
   the week until Friday, 22 March when it was announced she had been
   advised by her doctors to make no more public speeches on health
   grounds, having suffered several small strokes. According to her former
   press spokesman Bernard Ingham, Thatcher has no short-term memory as a
   result of the strokes.

   She remains active in various groups, including Conservative Way
   Forward, the Bruges Group and the European Foundation. She was widowed
   on 26 June 2003.

   On 11 June 2004, Thatcher attended the funeral of, and delivered a
   tribute via videotape to, former United States President Ronald Reagan
   at his state funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
   Thatcher then flew to California with the Reagan entourage, and
   attended the memorial service and internment ceremony for President
   Reagan at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
   Thatcher attends the official Washington, D.C. memorial service marking
   the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, pictured with Vice
   President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney.
   Thatcher attends the official Washington, D.C. memorial service marking
   the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, pictured with Vice
   President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney.

   In December 2004, it was reported that Thatcher had told a private
   meeting of Conservative MPs that she was against the British
   Government's plan to introduce identity cards. She is said to have
   remarked that ID cards were a "Germanic concept and completely alien to
   this country".

   On 13 October 2005, Thatcher marked her 80th birthday with a party at
   the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hyde Park where the guests included
   Queen Elizabeth II, The Duke of Edinburgh, and Princess Alexandra, The
   Honourable Lady Ogilvy. There, Geoffrey Howe, now Lord Howe of
   Aberavon, commented on her political career: "Her real triumph was to
   have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did
   eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as
   irreversible."

   In September, 2006, Thatcher attended the official Washington, D.C.
   memorial service marking the 5th anniversary of the September 11th
   terror attacks . She attended as a guest of the U.S. Vice President,
   Dick Cheney, and met with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
   during her visit. It marked her first visit to the United States since
   the funeral for former U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in
   April 2006.

   On 12 November 2006, she appeared at the Remembrance Day parade at the
   Cenotaph in London, leaning heavily on the arm of former Prime
   Minister, John Major. One week later, she released an effusive
   statement of condolence on the death of her friend and economic mentor,
   Milton Friedman, the man often described as the inspiration behind
   Thatcherism. On 10 December she announced she was 'deeply saddened' by
   the death of the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet .

   On 21 February 2007 as a statue of her was unveiled in the UK
   Parliament, Lady Thatcher made a rare and brief speech in the members'
   lobby of the House of Commons. She said: "I might have preferred iron -
   but bronze will do... It won't rust. And, this time I hope, the head
   will stay on." (A previous statue in stone had been attacked and
   decapitated while on public exhibition.).

Legacy

   Margaret Thatcher has undoubtedly made a great impact on British and
   global politics. Her policies were emulated around the world, and,
   though divisive, even left-wing politicians such as Tony Benn have
   stated their admiration for the straight-forward, unflinching way in
   which she conducted her policies. The first woman to hold the post of
   Prime Minister, she was also one of the longest serving Prime Ministers
   ranking with the likes of the Lord Salisbury. Her departure was one of
   the most dramatic events in British political history.

   She has been credited for her macroeconomic reforms with "rescuing" the
   British economy from the stagnation of the 1970s, and is admired for
   her committed radicalism on economic issues. She was a divisive figure,
   and some still hold her responsible for destroying much of the UK's
   manufacturing base, consigning many to long-term unemployment (reaching
   4 million in the decade she was in power). However, supporters of
   privatisation and of the free market cite the recovery of the economy
   during the mid-1980s and the present-day success of the British
   economy, with its relatively low unemployment and structural shift away
   from manufacturing towards the service sector. An unfortunate effect of
   her policies was that many of the publicly supported industries and
   industrial plants that shrank or closed down were the predominant
   employers in their areas, thus causing pockets of very high
   unemployment, while the growth of new services and technologies
   normally took place in other usually more prosperous areas.

   When Thatcher took over in 1979, Britain was sometimes nicknamed as the
   " sick man of Europe" in the 1970s. Arguably, the UK emerged from the
   1980s as one of the more successful economies in Europe. While the
   unemployment rate did eventually come down, it came after initial job
   losses and radical labour market reforms. These included laws that
   weakened trade unions and the deregulation of financial markets, which
   certainly played a part in returning London to a leadership position as
   a European financial centre, and her push for increased competition in
   telecommunications and other public utilities.

   Perceptions of Margaret Thatcher are mixed among the British public.
   Few would argue that there was any woman who played a more important
   role on the world stage in the 20th century. In perhaps the sincerest
   form of flattery, Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, himself a
   thrice-elected Prime Minister, has acknowledged her importance.
   Thatcher herself indirectly acknowledged Blair during a Conservative
   leadership contest when she said "The Conservative Party doesn't need
   someone that can beat Mr Blair. They need someone like Mr Blair."

   Through the Common Agricultural Policy, British agriculture was (and
   remains) heavily subsidised while other failing parts of the economy
   did not receive similar tax revenue support. This geographical
   imbalance in Thatcher's support contributed directly to the growth of
   devolution movements in those areas.

   Perceptions abroad broadly follow the same political divisions.
   Critical satirists have often caricatured her. For instance, French
   singer Renaud wrote a song, Miss Maggie, which lauded women as
   refraining from many of the silly behaviours of males – and every time
   making an exception for "Mrs Thatcher". She may be remembered most of
   all for her remark "There is no such thing as society" to the reporter
   Douglas Keay, for Woman's Own magazine, 23 September 1987. This remark
   has frequently been quoted out of its full context and the surrounding
   remarks were as follows:

     "I think we've been through a period where too many people have been
     given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the
     government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a
     grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're
     casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such
     thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are
     families. And no government can do anything except through people,
     and people must look to themselves first."

   In 1996, the Scott Inquiry into the Arms-to-Iraq affair investigated
   the Thatcher government's record in dealing with Saddam Hussein. It
   revealed how £1bn of Whitehall money was used in soft loan guarantees
   for British exporters to Iraq. The judge found that during Baghdad's
   protracted invasion of Iran in the 1980s, officials destroyed documents
   relating to the export of Chieftain tank parts to Jordan which ended up
   in Iraq. Ministers clandestinely relaxed official guidelines to help
   private companies sell machine tools which were used in munitions
   factories. The British company Racal exported sophisticated Jaguar V
   radios to the former Iraqi dictator's army on credit. Members of the
   Conservative cabinet refused to stop lending guaranteed funds to Saddam
   even after he executed a British journalist, Farzad Bazoft, Thatcher’s
   cabinet minuting that they did not want to damage British industry.

   Many on both the right and left agree that Thatcher had a
   transformative effect on the British political spectrum and that her
   tenure had the effect of moving the major political parties rightward.
   Will Hutton, author of the best selling The State We're In, argues that
   her necessary economic changes could have been achieved with more
   consensus and less hardship by a leader less enamoured of US hegemonic
   power.

   New Labour and Blairism have incorporated much of the economic, social
   and political tenets of "Thatcherism" in the same manner as, in a
   previous era, the Conservative Party from the 1950s until the days of
   Edward Heath accepted many of the basic assumptions of the welfare
   state instituted by Labour governments. The curtailing and large-scale
   dismantling of elements of the welfare state under Thatcher have
   largely remained. As well, Thatcher's program of privatising
   state-owned enterprises has not been reversed. Indeed, successive Tory
   and Labour governments have further curtailed the involvement of the
   state in the economy and have further dismantled public ownership.

   Thatcher's impact on the trade union movement in Britain has been
   lasting, with the breaking of the miners' strike of 1984-1985 seen as a
   watershed moment, or even a breaking point, for a union movement which
   has been unable to regain the degree of political power it exercised up
   through the 1970s. Unionisation rates in Britain have permanently
   declined since the 1980s, and the legislative instruments introduced to
   curtail the impact of strikes have not been reversed. Instead, the
   Labour Party has worked to loosen its ties to the trade union movement.
   While industrial action does still occur, there is no longer the kind
   of mass economic disruption seen in the 1970s, and the closed shop
   remains illegal.

   Thatcher's legacy has continued strongly to influence the Conservative
   Party itself. Successive leaders, starting with John Major, and
   continuing in opposition with William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and
   Michael Howard, have struggled with real or perceived factions in the
   Parliamentary and national party to determine what parts of her
   heritage should be retained or jettisoned. One cannot yet determine
   what the role of Thatcherism will be under the leadership of David
   Cameron.

   Thatcher is credited by Ronald Reagan with persuading him that Mikhail
   Gorbachev was sincere in his desire to reform and liberalize the Soviet
   Union. The resulting thaw in East-West relations helped to end the Cold
   War. In recognition of this, Lady Thatcher was awarded the 1998 Ronald
   Reagan Freedom Award by Mrs. Nancy Reagan. The award is only given to
   those who "have made monumental and lasting contributions to the cause
   of freedom worldwide," and "embody President Reagan's life long belief
   that one man or woman can truly make a difference." President Ronald
   Reagan, who was not able to attend the ceremony, was a longtime friend
   of Lady Thatcher.

   In a list compiled by the centre-left publication New Statesman in
   2006, she was voted fifth in the list of "Heroes of our time". She was
   also named a "Hero of Freedom" by the libertarian magazine Reason.

   In February 2007, she became the first Prime Minister of the United
   Kingdom to be honoured with a statue in the House of Commons while
   still alive. The statue is made of bronze and stands opposite her
   political hero and predecessor, Winston Churchill. The statue, by
   sculptor Antony Dufort, shows her in a typical lively and swashbuckling
   posture, as though she is addressing the House of Commons, with her
   right arm outstretched. Thatcher said she was thrilled with it.

Titles and honours

Titles from birth

   Titles Baroness Thatcher has held from birth, in chronological order:
     * Miss Margaret Roberts ( 13 October 1925 – 13 December 1951)
     * Mrs Denis Thatcher ( 13 December 1951 – 8 October 1959)
     * Mrs Denis Thatcher, MP ( 8 October 1959 – 22 June 1970)
     * The Rt Hon. Margaret Thatcher, MP ( 22 June 1970 – 7 December 1990)
     * The Rt Hon. Margaret Thatcher, OM, MP ( 7 December 1990 – 4
       February 1991)
     * The Rt Hon. Lady Thatcher, OM, MP ( 4 February 1991 – 16 March
       1992)
     * The Rt Hon. Lady Thatcher, OM ( 16 March 1992 – 26 June 1992)
     * The Rt Hon. The Baroness Thatcher, OM, PC ( 26 June 1992 – 22 April
       1995)
     * The Rt Hon. The Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC ( 22 April 1995 – )

Honours

     * Lady of the Most Noble Order of the Garter
     * Member of the Order of Merit
     * Member of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council
     * Fellow of the Royal Society
     * Honorary member of the gentlemen's club the Carlton Club, and the
       only woman entitled to full membership rights.

Foreign honours

     * Presidential Medal of Freedom
     * Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom
     * Patron of the Heritage Foundation
     * Ronald Reagan Freedom Award

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