Quoting the funny Margaret Thatcher :

“It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.”

“On my way here I passed a local cinema and it turned out you were expecting me after all, for the billboards read: The Mummy Returns.”

“In politics, if you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.”

“I don't mind how much my Ministers talk, so long as they do what I say.”

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC . . . born Margaret Hilda Roberts on 13 October 1925 in the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, England . . . was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. She was leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 until 1990. 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 woman to have held any of the four great offices of state.

Thatcher’s 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, nee 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.

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. When the Conservative party under Edward Heath won the 1970 general election, Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education and Science.

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.

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.

Margaret Thatcher has undoubtedly made a great impact on British and global politics. Her policies were emulated around the world,

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.

- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Photo credit: Wikipedia

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