Margaret Thatcher - Iron Lady

2. Margaret Thatcher –
the first female
British Prime Minister,
leader of the Conservative
Party governing from
1979 – 1990
Queen Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher

3. Margaret Thatcher

4. Margaret Thatcher (Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness
Thatcher of Kesteven) was born on October 13th 1925 in
Grantham to Alfred and Beatrice Roberts. The Roberts family
ran a grocery business, bringing up two daughters in a flat over
the shop.
Margaret Thatcher's home and
early life in Grantham played a
large part in forming her political
convictions. Her parents were
Methodists and her father was a
local councilor.

5. Margaret Roberts attended
Huntingtower Road Primary
School and won a scholarship to
Kesteven and Grantham Girls'
School.
From there won a
place at Oxford, where she studied
chemistry at Somerville College
(1943-47). Her tutor was Dorothy
Hodgkin, a pioneer of X-ray
crystallography who won a Nobel
Prize in 1964.

6. After graduating,
Roberts moved to Colchester in
Essex to work as a research
chemist. She joined the local
Conservative Association.
In her mid-twenties she ran
as the Conservative candidate for
the strong Labour seat of Dartford
(1950 and 1951), winning national
publicity as the youngest woman
candidate in the country.
She lost both times, but cut
the Labour majority sharply
enjoyed the experience of
campaigning.

7. In Dartford she met Denis Thatcher, a successful and
wealthy businessman, whom she married in December 1951.
Denis funded his wife's studies for the bar; she qualified as a
barrister in 1953 and specialized in taxation. The same year her
twins, Carol and Mark, were born.

8. Margaret Thatcher was
elected to Parliament in 1959
as Member of Parliament for
Finchley, a north London
constituency, which she
continued to represent until she
was made a member of the
House of Lords (as Baroness
Thatcher) in 1992.
The Conservative party
under Edward Heath won the
1970 general election, and
Thatcher was subsequently
appointed Secretary of State for
Education and Science.

9. The Heath government experienced difficulties with
oil embargoes and union demands for wage increases in 1973,
and lost 1974 general election. Labour went on to win a majority
in 1974 general election. Heath's leadership of the Conservative
Party looked increasingly in doubt. Thatcher became party
leader in 1975.
The Labour government faced public unease about the
direction of the country and a damaging series of strikes during
the winter of 1978–79. A general election was called after James
Callaghan's government lost a motion of no confidence in early
1979.
The leader of the Opposition 1975–1979

10. The Conservatives won a majority in the House of
Commons, and Margaret Thatcher became the
UK's first female Prime Minister.

11. Margaret Thatcher

12. The new government pledged
to check and reverse Britain's
economic decline. Direct taxes
were cut, indirect taxes were
increased. By the end of Thatcher's
first term, unemployment in Britain
was more than three million and it
began to fall only in 1986.
Inflation was checked and the
government created the
expectation that it would do
whatever was necessary to keep it
low.
1979-1983: Prime Minister – First Term

13. The economy
continued to improve during
the 1983-87 Parliament and
the policy of economic
liberalization was extended.
The government began to
pursue a policy of selling state
assets.
The British
privatizations of the 1980s
were the first of their kind and
proved influential across the
world.

14. In October 1984 the Irish Republican Army attempted to murder
Margaret Thatcher and many of her cabinet by bombing her hotel in
Brighton during the Conservative Party annual conference.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 was an attempt to improve
security cooperation between Britain and Ireland and to give some
recognition to the political outlook of Catholics in Northern Ireland, an
initiative which won warm endorsement from the Reagan
administration and the US Congress.
Margaret Thatcher & Ronald Reagan at
Camp David, 22 December 1984.

15. The legislative platform of the
third-term Thatcher Government
was among the most ambitious
ever put forward by a British
administration.
There were measures to
reform the education system
(1988). There was a new tax
system for local government
(1989), the Community Charge.
And there was legislation to
separate purchasers and
providers within the National
Health Service (1990).

16. After 1990 Lady Thatcher remained a potent political figure.
She wrote two best-selling volumes of memoirs - The Downing
Street Years (1993) and The Path to Power (1995) - while continuing
for a full decade to tour the world as a lecturer. A book of reflections
on international politics - Statecraft - was published in 2002.

17. «I do not know anyone who has got to the top without
hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to
the top, but should get you pretty near».

18. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/essential/
biography.asp
http://www.biography.com/people/margaret
-thatcher-9504796
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/author
s/m/margaret_thatcher.html
http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/margaret-
thatcher/as-prime-minister.html