Margaret Thatcher Biography

 Margaret Thatcher 

Biography 

(13OCT1925 - 08April2013).

Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts in Grantham, Lincolnshire, on 13 October 1925. Her father was Alfred Roberts, originally from Northamptonshire, and her mother was Beatrice Ethel (née Stephenson) from Lincolnshire. She spent her childhood in Grantham, where her father owned two grocery shops. She and her older sister Muriel (1921-2004) were raised in the flat above the larger of the two, located near the railway line. Her father was active in local politics and the Methodist church, serving as an alderman and a local preacher,and brought up his daughter as a strict Methodist.He came from a Liberal family but stood—as was then customary in local government—as an Independent. He was Mayor of Grantham in 1945–46 and lost his position as alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority on Grantham Council in 1950.  

Early political career In the 1950 and 1951 general elections, she was the Conservative candidate for the safe Labour seat of Dartford, where she attracted media attention as the youngest and the only female candidate.She lost both times to Norman Dodds, but reduced the Labour majority by 6,000, and then a further 1,000.(By an odd coincidence, Edward Heath was elected for the first time in the neighbouring constituency in 1950). During the campaigns, she was supported by her parents and by Denis Thatcher, whom she married in December 1951.Denis funded his wife's studies for the bar;she qualified as a barrister in 1953 and specialised in taxation.That same year her twins, Carol and Mark, were born.

 Member of Parliament (1959–1970) Thatcher was not a candidate in the 1955 general election as it came fairly soon after the birth of her children. Later that year, she was narrowly defeated when she sought selection as the candidate for the Orpington by-election, 1955. Afterwards, she began looking for a Conservative safe seat and was selected as the candidate for Finchley in April 1958 (narrowly beating Ian Montagu Fraser). She was elected as MP for the seat after a hard campaign in the 1959 election.Her maiden speech was in support of her private member's bill (Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960), requiring local authorities to hold their council meetings in public.In 1961 she went against the Conservative Party's official position by voting for the restoration of birching as a judicial corporal punishment.She regarded Finchley's Jewish residents as "her people" and became a founding member of the Anglo-Israel Friendship League of Finchley as well as a member of the Conservative Friends of Israel.She also believed Israel had to trade land for peace, and condemned Israel's 1981 bombing of Osirak as "a grave breach of international law".

 Education Secretary and Cabinet Minister (1970–1974) The Conservative party under Edward Heath won the 1970 general election, and Thatcher was subsequently appointed to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Education and Science. During her first months in office she attracted public attention as a result of the administration's attempts to cut spending. She gave priority to academic needs in schools and imposed public expenditure cuts on the state education system, resulting in the abolition of free milk for schoolchildren aged seven to eleven.She held that few children would suffer if schools were charged for milk, but she agreed to provide younger children with a third of a pint daily, for nutritional purposes.[46] Her decision provoked a storm of protest from the Labour party and the press,leading to the moniker "Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher".Cabinet papers of the time reveal that Thatcher opposed the policy but was forced into it by the Treasury. Thatcher wrote in her autobiography: "I learned a valuable lesson [from the experience]. I had incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political benefit."  

Margaret Thatcher, Leader of the Opposition, 18 September 1975

Leader of the Opposition (1975–1979) Margaret Thatcher, Leader of the Opposition, 18 September 1975 The Heath government continued to experience difficulties with oil embargoes and union demands for wage increases in 1973 and lost the February 1974 general election.Labour formed a minority government and went on to win a narrow majority in the October 1974 general election. Heath's leadership of the Conservative Party looked increasingly in doubt. Thatcher was not initially the obvious replacement, but she eventually became the main challenger, promising a fresh start.Her main support came from the Conservative 1922 Committee.She defeated Heath on the first ballot and he resigned the leadership.In the second ballot she defeated Heath's preferred successor, William Whitelaw, and became party leader on 11 February 1975; she appointed Whitelaw as her deputy. Heath remained disenchanted with Thatcher to the end of his life, for what he and many of his supporters perceived as her disloyalty in standing against him. On 19 January 1976 Thatcher made a speech in Kensington Town Hall in which she made a scathing attack on the Soviet Union: 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) called her the "Iron Lady," a sobriquet she gladly adopted. The Labour government then faced fresh public unease about the direction of the country and a damaging series of strikes during the winter of 1978–79, dubbed the "Winter of Discontent". The Conservatives attacked the Labour government's unemployment record, using advertising with the slogan Labour Isn't Working. A general election was called after James Callaghan's government lost a motion of no confidence in early 1979. The Conservatives won a 44-seat majority in the House of Commons, and Margaret Thatcher became the UK's first female Prime Minister.

Thatcher's Cabinet meets with Reagan's Cabinet at the White House, 1981

Prime Minister (1979–1990) Main article: Premiership of Margaret Thatcher Thatcher is the only woman in a room, where a dozen men in suits sit around an oval table. Reagan and Thatcher sit opposite each other in the middle of the long axis of the table. The room is decorated in white, with drapes, a gold chandelier and a portrait of Lincoln. Thatcher's Cabinet meets with Reagan's Cabinet at the White House, 1981 Thatcher became Prime Minister on 4 May 1979. Arriving at 10 Downing Street, she said, in a paraphrase of the "Prayer of Saint Francis": 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.

Challenges to leadership and resignation Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by the little-known backbench MP Sir Anthony Meyer in the 1989 leadership election. Of the 374 Conservative MPs eligible to vote, 314 voted for Thatcher and 33 for Meyer.Her supporters in the party viewed the result as a success, and rejected suggestions that there was discontent within the party. During her premiership Thatcher had the second-lowest average approval rating, at 40 percent, of any post-war Prime Minister. Polls consistently showed that she was less popular than her party. A self-described conviction politician, Thatcher always insisted that she did not care about her poll ratings, pointing instead to her unbeaten election record. Photograph Thatcher in 1990 Opinion polls in September 1990 reported that Labour had established a 14% lead over the Conservatives, and by November the Conservatives had been trailing Labour for 18 months. These ratings, together with Thatcher's combative personality and willingness to override colleagues' opinions, contributed to discontent within the Conservative party. On 1 November 1990 Geoffrey Howe, the last remaining member of Thatcher's original 1979 cabinet, resigned from his position as Deputy Prime Minister over her refusal to agree to a timetable for Britain to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.In his resignation speech on 13 November, Howe commented on Thatcher's European stance: "It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find the moment that the first balls are bowled that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain." His resignation was fatal to Thatcher's premiership. The next day, Michael Heseltine mounted a challenge for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Opinion polls had indicated that he would give the Conservatives a national lead over Labour. Although Thatcher won the first ballot, Heseltine attracted sufficient support (152 votes) to force a second ballot. Under party rules, Thatcher not only needed to win a majority, but her margin over Heseltine had to be equivalent to 15 percent of the 372 Conservative MPs in order to win the leadership election outright; she came up four votes short.Thatcher initially stated that she intended to "fight on and fight to win" the second ballot, but consultation with her Cabinet persuaded her to withdraw.After seeing the Queen, calling other world leaders, and making one final Commons speech, she left Downing Street in tears. She regarded her ousting as a betrayal. Thatcher was replaced as Prime Minister and party leader by her Chancellor John Major, who oversaw an upturn in Conservative support in the 17 months leading up to the 1992 general election and led the Conservatives to their fourth successive victory on 9 April 1992.Thatcher favoured Major over Heseltine in the leadership contest, but her support for him weakened in later years.

 Later life (1990–2013) Thatcher returned to the backbenches as MP for Finchley for two years after leaving the premiership. She retired from the House at the 1992 election, aged 66, saying that leaving the Commons would allow her more freedom to speak her mind. On 11 June 2004, Thatcher attended the state funeral service for Ronald Reagan.She delivered her eulogy via videotape; in view of her health, the message had been pre-recorded several months earlier. Thatcher flew to California with the Reagan entourage, and attended the memorial service and interment ceremony for the president at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Thatcher attends a Washington memorial service marking the 5th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, pictured with Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hyde Park, London, on 13 October 2005; guests included the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Alexandra and Tony Blair. Geoffrey Howe, by then Lord Howe of Aberavon, was also present, and said of his former leader: "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." According to a later article in The Daily Telegraph, Thatcher's daughter Carol first revealed that her mother had dementia in 2005, saying that "Mum doesn't read much any more because of her memory loss .. It's pointless. She can't remember the beginning of a sentence by the time she reaches the end." She later recounted how she was first struck by her mother's dementia when she muddled the Falklands conflict with the Yugoslav wars; she has also recalled the pain of needing to tell her mother repeatedly that Denis Thatcher was dead. In 2006, Thatcher attended the official Washington, D.C. memorial service to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States. She was a guest of Vice President Dick Cheney, and met Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit. In February 2007, Thatcher became the first living British Prime Minister to be honoured with a statue in the Houses of Parliament. The bronze statue stands opposite that of her political hero, Sir Winston Churchill, and was unveiled on 21 February 2007 with Thatcher in attendance; she made a rare and brief speech in the members' lobby of the House of Commons, responding: "I might have preferred iron – but bronze will do ... It won't rust." The statue shows her addressing the House of Commons, with her right arm outstretched. She was a public supporter of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism and the resulting Prague Process, and sent a public letter of support to its preceding conference. After collapsing at a House of Lords dinner, Thatcher was admitted to St Thomas' Hospital in central London on 7 March 2008 for tests. Thatcher returned to 10 Downing Street in late November 2009 for the unveiling of an official portrait by artist Richard Stone, an unusual honour for a living ex-Prime Minister. Stone had previously painted portraits of the Queen and the Queen Mother. At the 2010 Conservative Party conference, the new Prime Minister David Cameron announced that he would invite Thatcher back to 10 Downing Street on her 85th birthday for a party to be attended by past and present ministers. She pulled out of the celebration, reportedly because of influenza. She was invited to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton on 29 April 2011, but did not attend owing to ill health. On 4 July 2011, Thatcher was to attend a ceremony for the unveiling of a 10-foot statue to former American President Ronald Reagan, outside the American Embassy in London, but was unable to attend because of frail health. On 31 July 2011, it was announced that her office in the House of Lords had been closed.[228] Earlier that month, Thatcher had been named the most competent British Prime Minister of the past 30 years in an Ipsos MORI poll. On 21 December 2012, she underwent an operation to remove a growth from her bladder.

Death :
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dies aged 87 Thatcher died on the morning of 8 April 2013 at The Ritz Hotel in London after suffering a stroke. She had been staying at a suite in The Ritz Hotel since Christmas 2012 after having difficulty with stairs at her Chester Square home. She had suffered from poor health for several years.Lord Bell, Thatcher's spokesman, confirmed her death in a press release issued at 12:52 BST (11:52 UTC). Thatcher's death raised a mix of reactions, with many praising her leadership and achievements whilst others criticised her political philosophies, policies and actions while in office. In accordance with her wishes, Thatcher will not receive a state funeral, which former Prime Ministers do not ordinarily receive. The funeral will be ceremonial, including military honours, with a church service at St. Paul's Cathedral.Her funeral will be held on 17 April.