Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold the position. As prime minister, she implemented policies that came to be known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.
Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a research chemist before becoming a barrister. She was elected Member of Parliament for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her secretary of state for education and science in his 1970–1974 government. In 1975, she defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election to become leader of the opposition, the first woman to lead a major political party in the UK.
On becoming prime minister after winning the 1979 general election, Thatcher introduced a series of economic policies intended to reverse high inflation and Britain's struggles in the wake of the Winter of Discontent and an oncoming recession. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised greater individual liberty, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Her popularity in her first years in office waned amid the recession and rising unemployment. Victory in the 1982 Falklands War and the recovering economy brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her landslide re-election in 1983. She survived an assassination attempt by the Provisional IRA in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing and achieved a political victory against the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984–85 miners' strike. In 1986, Thatcher oversaw the deregulation of UK financial markets, leading to an economic boom, in what came to be known as the Big Bang.
Thatcher was re-elected for a third term with another landslide in 1987, but her subsequent support for the Community Charge was widely unpopular, and her increasingly Eurosceptic views on the European Community were not shared by others in her cabinet. She resigned as prime minister and party leader in 1990, after a challenge was launched to her leadership, and was succeeded by John Major, her chancellor of the Exchequer. After retiring from the Commons in 1992, she was given a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher which entitled her to sit in the House of Lords. In 2013, she died of a stroke at the Ritz Hotel, London, at the age of 87.
A polarising figure in British politics, Thatcher is nonetheless viewed favourably in historical rankings and public opinion of British prime ministers. Her tenure constituted a realignment towards neoliberal policies in Britain; the complex legacy attributed to this shift continues to be debated into the 21st century.
Early life and education
Family and childhood (1925–1943)
Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on 13 October 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Her parents were Alfred Roberts, from Northamptonshire, and Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, from Lincolnshire. Her father's maternal grandmother, Catherine Sullivan, was born in County Kerry, Ireland.Roberts spent her childhood in Grantham, where her father owned a tobacconist's and a grocery shop. In 1938, before the Second World War, the Roberts family briefly gave sanctuary to a teenage Jewish girl who had escaped Nazi Germany. With her elder sister Muriel, Margaret saved pocket money to help pay for the teenager's journey.
Alfred was an alderman and a Methodist local preacher. He brought up his daughter as a strict Wesleyan Methodist, attending the Finkin Street Methodist Church, but Margaret was more sceptical; the future scientist told a friend that she could not believe in angels, having calculated that they needed a breastbone long to support wings. Alfred came from a Liberal family but stood as an Independent. He served as Mayor of Grantham from 1945 to 1946 and lost his position as alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority on Grantham Council in 1950.
Roberts attended Huntingtower Road Primary School and won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School, a grammar school. Her school reports showed hard work and continual improvement; her extracurricular activities included the piano, field hockey, poetry recitals, swimming and walking. She was head girl in 1942–43, and outside school, while the Second World War was ongoing, she voluntarily worked as a fire watcher in the local ARP service. Other students thought of Roberts as the "star scientist", although mistaken advice regarding cleaning ink from parquetry almost caused chlorine gas poisoning. In her upper sixth year, Roberts was accepted for a scholarship to study chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, a women's college, starting in 1944. After another candidate withdrew, Roberts entered Oxford in October 1943.
Oxford (1943–1947)
Following her arrival at Oxford, Roberts began studies under X-ray crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, the tutor in chemistry for Somerville College since 1934. Hodgkin considered Roberts a "good" student, and later recalled that "ne could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay". She opted to read for a classified honours degree, entailing an additional year of supervised research. As her thesis supervisor, Hodgkin assigned Roberts to work with Gerhard Schmidt, a researcher in Hodgkin's lab, to determine the structure of the antibiotic peptide gramicidin S. Although the research made some progress, the peptide's structure proved more complex than anticipated, and Schmidt would only determine its full structure much later; Roberts learned this in the 1960s while visiting the Weizmann Institute, where her former research partner was then working.Roberts graduated in 1947 with a second-class honours degree in chemistry, and in 1950 also received the degree of Master of Arts. Although Hodgkin would later be critical of her former student's politics, they continued to correspond into the 1980s, and Roberts in her memoirs would describe her mentor as "ever-helpful", "a brilliant scientist and a gifted teacher". As prime minister, she would keep a portrait of Hodgkin at 10 Downing Street. Later in life, she was reportedly prouder of becoming the first prime minister with a science degree than becoming the first female prime minister. While prime minister, she attempted to preserve Somerville as a women's college. Twice a week outside study, she worked in a local forces canteen.
During her time at Oxford, Roberts was noted for her isolated and serious attitude. Her first boyfriend, Tony Bray, recalled that she was "very thoughtful and a very good conversationalist. That's probably what interested me. She was good at general subjects".
She was a member of Wesley Memorial Church, became a lay preacher and joined the John Wesley Society. She also attended Somerville College Chapel and St Mary's.
Roberts's coursework involved subjects beyond chemistry as she was already contemplating an entry into law and politics. Her enthusiasm for politics as a girl made Bray think of her as "unusual" and her parents as "slightly austere" and "very proper". Roberts became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946. She was influenced at university by political works such as Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which condemned economic intervention by government as a precursor to an authoritarian state.
Post-Oxford career (1947–1951)
After graduating, Roberts secured a position as a research chemist for British Xylonite following a series of interviews arranged by Oxford; she subsequently moved to Colchester in Essex to work at the firm. Little is known about her brief time there. By her own account, she was initially enthusiastic about the position, as she had been intended to function as a personal assistant to the company's head of research and development, providing opportunities to learn about operations management: "But on my arrival it was decided that there was not enough to do in that capacity." Instead, she seems to have researched methods of attaching polyvinyl chloride to metals. While with the firm, she joined the Association of Scientific Workers. In 1948, she applied for a job at Imperial Chemical Industries but was rejected after the personnel department assessed her as "headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated". Jon Agar in Notes and Records argues that her understanding of modern scientific research later impacted her views as prime minister.Roberts joined the local Conservative Association and attended the party conference at Llandudno, Wales, in 1948, as a representative of the University Graduate Conservative Association. Meanwhile, she became a high-ranking affiliate of the Vermin Club, a group of grassroots Conservatives formed in response to a derogatory comment made by Aneurin Bevan. One of her Oxford friends was also a friend of the Chair of the Dartford Conservative Association in Kent, who were looking for candidates. Officials of the association were so impressed by her that they asked her to apply, even though she was not on the party's approved list; she was selected in January 1950 and added to the approved list post ante.
At a dinner following her formal adoption as Conservative candidate for Dartford in February 1949, she met divorcé Denis Thatcher, a successful and wealthy businessman, who drove her to her Essex train. After their first meeting, she described him to Muriel as "not a very attractive creature – very reserved but quite nice". In preparation for the election, Roberts moved to Dartford, while she supported herself by working as a research chemist for J. Lyons and Co. in Hammersmith, reportedly as part of a team developing emulsifiers for ice cream. As the work was more theoretical in nature than during her prior role with BX Plastics, Roberts found it "more satisfying". While at Lyons, she worked under the supervision of Hans Jellinek, who headed the company's physical chemistry section. Jellinek assigned her to research the saponification of α-monostearin, which has properties as an emulsifier, stabiliser and food preservative. Agar has noted the research may have been connected with the emulsification of ice cream, but only as a possibility. In September 1951, their research was published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, a recently launched publication of the Society of Chemical Industry, as "The saponification of α-monostearin in a monolayer". This would be Roberts's sole scientific publication. In 1979, following his former assistant's election as prime minister, Jellinek, by then a professor of physical chemistry at Clarkson University in the United States, said she had done "a very good job" on the project, "showing great determination". She sent Jellinek a congratulatory letter upon his retirement in 1984, and another letter shortly before his death two years later.
Roberts married at Wesley's Chapel and her children were baptised there, but she and her husband began attending Church of England services and would later convert to Anglicanism.