The core of this site is a massive database of MT's public statements of all kinds across the years (speeches, interviews, press conferences, etc), searchable by date, subject, importance, and keyword. Being a woman is undoubtedly one of the features, possibly the most potent, that makes her ascent to power memorable, 25 years on, in a way that applied to no man. An unclubbable outsider, she allied herself to another outsider, Keith Joseph, and his free-market set. Unable to win the leadership ballot outright, she stood on the steps of In retrospect, in much dissenting commentary there was often a taint of unexamined sexism. Buy the CD-ROM from this link or find one The Thatcher government believed that the criminalisation of the republican prisoners would break the republican struggle. . Died: 24 February 2023, aged 90 Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. The Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 brought rhetorical as well as political Why don't you get a proper job, she once sneered at me. To claim that any woman's success is a boon for feminism is like saying all publicity is good publicity. "She had been offered the chance to get on and effectively she then refused to offer it to otherpeople. She led Britain further into Europe, while talking us further out. By 1990 it was transformed. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud. at Brighton, insisting that the Conference go on and That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. This is a style whose absence is much missed. Without the Falklands/Malvinas war, which exploited nationalism (as Argentinian dictator Galtieri did) and which Labour would not oppose, she would never have been re-elected in 1983. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). However, for almost a decade Sinn Fin had been patently trying to build a peace process and unfolding events on the world stage including the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, and the release of Mandela were evidence that governments, and apparently intractable situations, could change. Charles Powell was a senior foreign policy . Contrary to an increasingly common belief, "a woman who is successful" is not synonymous with "a feminist". I met her just once, as a reporter in the press pack that followed her tour around Greece and Yugoslavia in 1980. announced that White speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her June 30, 1992 - Swearing . Interview by Benedict King. Where once we stood within a recognisable postwar social democratic European tradition, after Thatcher the country had rowed halfway across the Atlantic, psychologically imbued with US neoliberal individualism. Such seminars are regular events in Downing Street under the coalition. The stance was often in broadest terms, more moral than political. In fact, several countries have adopted these ideas with startlingly successful results; just changing the wording on some forms raised an extra 200m income tax in Britain, while personalised text messages drastically reduced the use of bailiffs to recover court fines. When I think of this memorial, I think of the words of Rupert Brooke, "that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.". But growth rates in the decades since her period in office have been lower than during those that preceded her; nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth. The remainder are listed without a text because . Promises. The organised working class, almost alone, had put Britain on the skids. She remained in power till I was 15. Hire a Writer. Luckily, a longer paper means you get a bigger discount! Given the global economic crisis, rampant corporate greed and growing inequality, this should be a time of great ferment, with endless policy proposals bubbling up to challenge the post-Thatcher consensus at a time of immense and unsettling change. a new dominance from Brussels", the Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. From her start in politics, Thatcher often attracted sexist critiques for the way she spoke, with many it dubbing her voice "shrill" and "patronizing." Television critic Clive James even compared . John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. Interviewing him, I was struck by a Victorian sort of kindness; as an Oxford student in the 1930s he'd worked in his vacation helping families of the unemployed in the Yorkshire coalfield one of them had even named their baby Keith in his honour. Rather, she was a classic example of a certain kind of conservative woman who believed that all women should pull themselves up just as she had done, conveniently overlooking that not all women are blessed with the privileges that had been available to her, such as a wealthy and supportive husband and domestic help. A great windfall in the short-term for asset-owners one form of inflation she encouraged but disastrous for future generations. Would we like her back? She continued for some reason to consider me worth talking to. Not even the Falklands war would push it off the tracks or damage it in any way. There are more than 8,000. MT gave her first But for others, the change in landscape is all too real. On the same edition of Channel 4 News, Louise Mensch named only three successful female politicians as part of her defence ofThatcher and only one of those was a Conservative. Margaret Thatcher was a hugely divisive figure in British politics. Many are children of the Thatcher age. The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. After the 1987 election, Thatcher cut an increasingly isolated figure. Margaret Thatcher's 1980 speech was written by playwright Ronnie Miller, and Julia recalls that the night before delivering the speech she had a huge row with him about the content. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. In my view, nothing said prior to her passing or since has been inaccurate in the description of this very special, warm relationship, the likes of which we may never see again. The welfare state set out to ensure that no one, in the UK at least, would starve or freeze to death, or suffer or die for lack of medical or other care. Thanks to the comparison with Cameron, we are reminded that the Thatcher reign was more circumspect and well-managed than it seemed at the time. From the valleys of Wales to the far reaches of Scotland, miners were, by and large, socialists by nature but this was tempered by strong Christian beliefs. Reagan had sought to meet with then Prime Minister James Callaghan, but the request was rejected, and bucked to then Foreign Minister David Owen. Yes, QI can report that a newspaper called the Evening News on . Well, everything really, even her name. In his usual slightly dishevelled style, he went to Downing Street to discuss his pioneering concepts of behavioural economics and attempts to implement them under Barack Obama. No one noticed, but she was Blair's first guest at Downing Street in 1997. No such alarms ring in Cameron's ears. Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. At a party leaders' meeting in Washington, DC in 1985, Prime Minister Thatcher spent all day in the House of Commons, then boarded Concorde and flew to Washington to participate until late into the evening; she took such policy co-operation very seriously. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. In 1990 Thatcher authorised the then British secretary of state Peter Brooke to reopen back-channel negotiations with republicans. Her onslaught on the trade unions left those movements pale imitations of their former selves, too weak to resist the drive to the "flexible labour market" which has seen Britain become the home of what one senior Labour figure calls "crappy jobs", with low pay and no protection. If I become PM, I will deliver the radical set of reforms need to unleash growth. They rallied around each other when times were hard. Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. Your local electricity "board" could be a very unfriendly place. Thatcher is often credited with showing that you could get to the top whatever your background. her intention to allow her name to go forward to the second ballot (20 Second, it's now easier to see the scale of the setback she inflicted on Britain's idea of its own future. Her unforgettable presence, but also her policy achievements. Talk to a Labour MP and you end up discussing politics and positioning; talk to a Tory, and it tends to be about policy. It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. Thatcher has said that negotiation, and not strong economic sanctions, is the way to persuade South Africa's white-minority government to dismantle apartheid. Thatcher was never insensitive to the impact of her policies on the poor. It was part of her conspicuous virtue, her indifference to familiar political conventions. If you want anything done, ask a woman.". Here is an excerpt from People [PMT]: "In politics," Margaret Thatcher once acidly observed, "if you want anything said, ask a man. ", This attitude that men are fun but dumb, women are smart but strident, a view of the sexes that seems to come straight out of a Judd Apatow film led to various quotes of hers that some like to twist into proof that Thatcher was an unwitting feminist. As a result, Labour authorities in eight or so British cities have set up fairness commissions to reduce income differences locally. The problem for Labour is that this issue so fundamental, since it underscores so much policy is unresolved in their ranks. Out! But other villages have never recovered, their heart and purpose ripped out. When Margaret Thatcher won the general election in 1979, she became Prime Minister of a land in chaos. Sue Gray used to be my boss. That, plus (inevitable) de-industrialisation, coupled to her perceived overbearing and patronising manner. Behind "omnishambles" headlines, her revolution is being pushed forward on new fronts in schools, health, planning, policing, probation and welfare. as far as can be known. In former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's eulogy speech for President Ronald Reagan (2004), she elucidates what a kind and powerful man he was. speech which caused the Soviets to dub her "the Iron Lady", one She became deaf to all warning. Every quality had its obverse, but she had a myth-making charisma to capture the world's imagination. Perhaps we suspected that reality had created a character beyond our creative reach. Thatcher's opposition to a positive role for the state in industrial policy caused her grief even during her time in office, but a cross-party consensus newly shaped by Michael Heseltine's report has given him the last word. First was the sheer depth of hostility towards the Tories in general. Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. She made her remarks Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. That speech was a rare instance of a politician saying something tangible. If you have a . We are all on our own. Her effect was to force a deeper consideration of priorities, sometimes expressed in a variety of dystopias. (Interestingly, Currie also recalled that when she approached Thatcher in 1988 to get approval for the world's first national breast-screening programme, she tried to appeal to the PM initially "as a woman" but that swiftly proved unsuccessful. During the speech, . Nations need to know the big picture of where they belong and, coinciding with the Thatcher appearance at the top, clarity had apparently broken through the clouds of historic ambivalence. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. "You see," she announced in her self-satisfied way, "it just goes to show what people can do when they have to. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? Prime Minister Thatcher delivered the fourth speech to Congress by a British prime minister. Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots yet couldn't understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, as far as can be known. This report of the Conservative party conference ran in the Guardian on Saturday October 11 1980, Edited and full versions of Margaret Thatcher's 'The lady's not for turning' speech, delivered at the Conservative party conference in Brighton on 10 October 1980, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every That gives them the nerve to set about cutting benefits and the public realm with a glee they don't bother to hide. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. For those of us who were dismayed by her brisk distaste for that cosy state-dominated world, it was never enough to dislike her. they did not want her to go on (21 November) and that night she made the The relative wealth of the UK 1% had been falling steadily for 50 years when Thatcher took power in 1979; since then it has climbed steeply and is almost back to 1918 levels. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. She failed to replace those jobs with well-paid equivalents. The economy had become more productive, more competitive and more profitable. It became obvious that, while granting that I had "convictions", she never read a word of my stuff. . It was thoroughly "wet". wrong with politics? And the miners. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.". She was a prime minister who happened to be a woman. Literature had nothing to do with politics, the Italian writers said. When I started knocking on Highland doors in May 1983, two things struck me more than any other. But former speechwriter Trevor Reeves can no longer . This legacy remains intact with a party that places a premium on radical thinking and, for all its flaws, sets the political agenda. ", This was the great leader in her favourite pose as Samuel Smiles: human beings didn't need to be helped they needed to help themselves. . Rishi Sunak: 'Our country needs the . Thank you, too, Margaret. of the 1600 libraries around the world which hold the CD-ROM. This, too, we still live with. That's because, 23 years after she was ejected from Downing Street by her own party in a move whose psychic wounds linger on, the country we live in remains Thatcher's Britain. Quotation being the warmest form of praise, Larkin was naturally touched. She certainly was divisive, bisecting the country politically and geographically: hard-hit regions in the north of England, Wales and Scotland may be notably less civil in their farewells. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979, she Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. It is not true that Thatcher didn't care about the media. Several strong women on the continent have risen to the top, but thisBritish woman, in Britain of all places, became a phenomenon, first, throughher gender. In a twitter of panic, Labour shadow ministers sent out pleas yesterday: "Hoping all Labour supporters will respond with dignity and respect to news of Baroness Thatcher's death." Peggy Noonan. recommended by Simon Heffer. But on the subject of Europe, Thatcher became a contradictory figure. We must reduce the inequality that has seen a super-rich elite, openly contemptuous of the flag and family values Thatcher proclaimed, float free from the rest of us. In front of his journalist colleagues he was told to stand right in front of her so that she could hit him lightly with her order papers. Both were successful women who could play the flirt card when it suited them, but ultimately had little interest in being kind to their own sex; Thatcher especially resented being defined by her gender. delivered an outstanding defence of the Government in the Commons. A week later she spoke This is a political style, an aesthetic even, that has disappeared from view. Everyone knows where they were when they heard. Margaret Thatcher (October 13, 1925 - April 8, 2013) was the first woman prime minister of the United Kingdom and the first European woman to serve as a prime minister. Animals and Pets Anime Art Cars and Motor Vehicles Crafts and DIY Culture, Race, and Ethnicity Ethics and Philosophy Fashion Food and Drink History Hobbies Law Learning and Education Military Movies Music Place Podcasts and Streamers Politics Programming Reading, Writing, and Literature Religion and Spirituality Science Tabletop Games . We have his example. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant. It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. Yet for all these fissures, even Maoist modernisers and the most reactionary social conservatives share a similar stance over the role of the state. It was meant as a term of condemnation, a concise way of arguing that riots in the street or the devastation of a pit village were the inevitable features of this new land that had arisen in the 1980s, a country reshaped by the woman at the top. Gaze at the telephone. a new dominance from Brussels". The novel may thrive in adversity and it was a general sense of dismay at the new world she was showing us that lured many writers into opposition. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. Almost everything said of Thatcher's early years was untrue, partly through her own invention. She also put forward the idea of "a vast . Although the "right to buy" and the privatisation of utilities by selling shares to new small investors was often justified as giving rights to "the little people", the reality is that the less well-off fell ever further behind the rich. The set text is still Thatcher's declaration quoted in The Audience that "There is no such thing as society". After being asked to deliver a eulogy for the late Ronald Reagan on June 11, 2004, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech about her dear friend, and highlighted his best qualities through her writing. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. But it was overlaid by the supposedly masculine virtues, sometimes more manly than the men could ever assemble. As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. the British Embassy in Paris and stated At Bruges in September 1988 she outraged European orthodoxy by declaring: Reagan, for one, recognized the importance of Margaret Thatcher's presence as British prime minister, but would caution any discussionpartnerthat Pope John Paul played an equally important role. Cameron's crew crudely imagine she intended it. While Labour was now "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", ambitious feminism wanted to be let in to the boardroom and every corridor of power that and little else is what they mean by changing the world. successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to In October 1984 she survived an IRA bomb during the Conservative Conference The truth is less significant than the alteration to it. of times. Still plumbing for the essence, we have to examine other bits of residue. There is now, however, an opportunity to commit to a new politics that learns lessons from her ambition yet undoes the damage and focuses on reconstruction. Whether pushing each other off the road, barging past social rivals, beating up rival soccer fans, or idolising wealth as the only measure of virtue, Brits became more unpleasant to be with. Even some leading figures on the left have jealously praised the right's creativity and ideological crusaders. From a peak of 13 million in 1979, trade union membership had declined by 30% by 1990, and is now not much more than half what it was. A splendid synergy was created, deliberately and with just that in mind on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a Charles I moment in British history. This is one small sign of how the left seems paralysed by a lack of intellectual curiosity and confidence. In the north of Ireland she had the army and the Diplock courts which reached their peak in the mid 1980s. . We might speculate that an adviser had offered Thatcher a selection of good lines, or that she had asked to see some. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. People would denounce them unequivocally, often in graphic terms. But within a few years, a third of children were poor, a sign of the yawning inequality from which the country never recovered. But it did, and the consequences seem impossible to reverse. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. The Cameron generation wrongly see in the 1980s a revolution to emulate, starting with an economic crisis just like hers, as a chance to reshape everything. Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. You may not be a fan of Edwina Currie but, really, was she any worse than John Gummer? It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. One thinks now of the closing words of her splendid 2004 eulogy of Ronald Reagan, and how those words so perfectly speak a tribute to her life and works: "We here still move in twilight. Thatcher was born as Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, England. The leading feminist Natasha Walter called Thatcher "the great unsung heroine of British feminism". Mrs T shared the same reductionism. Flags were flying over Port Stanley on 14 June. Her heirs have not learned that lesson, with no sign of their promised "rebalancing". International studies of OECD countries suggest a close relationship between the decline in trade union membership and the rise in inequality. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. A longer version of this article appears on Gerry Adams' blog, Margaret Thatcher was good at destruction. But she exploited her luck. Thatcher was suspicious of democracy. Thatcher is remembered for her achievements, but more for a presence, which was wrapped up with being a woman. Few would argue that they have not endured. But now the history was what mattered. (They also reveal how she loved to surround herself with yes men who were always men.) The author uses this idea of freedom in her writing to allow the audience to feel and understand the mission of Reagan--"to restore the strength of the free world, and to free the slaves of communism" (6-7). Ed Miliband, a policy wonk himself, claims to be a conviction politician like Thatcher. Oxford CD-ROM explains how the statements were assembled and edited Even the nasty politics of "welfare reform" is driven by the high cost of subsidising low pay through in-work benefits, and indifference to the plight of jobless communities who have never recovered from de-industrialisation. While "one nation" Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian . What will not be forgotten? speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. Perhaps it is more simple for all the iniquities of capitalism, the tide of history favours the right. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. It came to a head over her most egregious policy failure, Europe. Britain was battered out of the somnolent conservatism, across awide front of economic policies and priorities, that had held back progress and, arguably, prosperity. The remainder are listed without a text because sometimes no record survives She had just finished the first volume of her memoirs, which she insisted was all her own work. Yet I wrote columns of pretty unremitting hostility to most of what she did. Meryl Streep's depiction of a shuffling figure, stricken and isolated by the death of her husband, Denis, may have softened memories, or formed them in the minds of a younger generation. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to Thatcher never kept a diary, but the archive includes rich details of her role in important domestic and world events. In this eulogy, Thatcher uses rhetorical strategies to convince her readers into believing what she states. and September 25, 2020. Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. Sayle recorded the song Get Me Mrs Thatcher, but says that in general he felt Thatcher jokes were a bit too easy, although he still shudders at the memory of a "wicked, incompetent mindset that was the spirit of the 80s". People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. By 1987, anti-Tory tactical voting had taken hold. The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. She made one It is my view that Thatcher authorised the killings at Gibraltar. But these concrete achievements do not wholly explain why she still looms so large, large enough that not one but two current West End plays The Audience and Billy Elliot grant Thatcher a pivotal, if largely unsympathetic, role, whether seen or unseen. Deep-seated and long overdue reforms of the 1980s paved the way for the long 16-year boom between 1992 and 2008. The "crime" he was accused of was to reclaim the oil revenue from local and foreign thieves, and use it to tackle poverty. To the victors we saycongratulations. As David Wearing put it this morning in satirizing these speak-no-ill-of-the-deceased moralists: "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. This regrettable transformation was blessed by a leader who probably did not know it was happening because she didn't care if it happened or not. The latest pit to close, Maltby in Yorkshire, still has a death and general purpose fund to help fellow miners and their families in times of hardship. At an international conference in Lisbon in the late 80s, the British faction, among whom were Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and myself, referred back to Thatcher constantly in our presentations. In the current wall-to-wall media welter, I caught the current leader of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davison MSP, being asked if Thatcher was an electoral asset for her. For some, the only consequence of that shift, still visible today, will be a changed brand name or higher bills. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem finding a way to pay its way in the world remains. Many whom Reagan encountered in public life thought of him in this way, but most politicians would love to reach even "Grade B" status. That 1983 general election contained the telltale seeds of eventual Scottish Tory self-destruction. On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. Watch a million words pour out today placing her anywhere from Boudicca to the wicked witch of the west. In the 2011 biographical drama film "The Iron Lady," Meryl Streep plays the role of Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The most widely used measure of income differences shows inequality increasing by more than a third during her period in office.