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Margaret Thatcher, Revolutionary Leader

Frederick E. Allen, Forbes
4/08/2013

 

Margaret Thatcher, who died today at 87, was an extraordinary kind of national leader: a person of passionate and unswerving moral and political conviction. She lived her political life not as a career but as a mission.

She was from the start an outsider, not just a woman in a nation whose leadership was dominated by men, but the daughter of a grocer. She made her way to the top by sheer energy and talent, studying at Oxford and then rising to the top of Britain’s Conservative party by 1975, when she was 50. She said a couple of years before that that “I don’t think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime.” She proved herself wrong.

She was prime minister from 1979 to 1990, and at first she alienated almost everybody. As she cut spending and entitlements, unemployment rose above three million, and by 1981 her approval rating sank to 25%. Her response: “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite 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.” Read full article>>