Margaret Thatcher may have all the chances to be remembered long after her demise occurring on April 8. Thatcher was 87, and it’s 23 years since she left her position of Britain’s Prime Minister which she had occupied for 11 years. She was hailed as the first woman in the office, and she turned out to be a P.M. with a difference!
If Winston Churchill was regarded as one big Conservative toughie who held the country’s own through the rages of the Second World War, Thatcher successfully competed with his reputation, and then some. Her enemy was probably not less powerful than Nazi Germany, albeit an inner one – economic depression, inflation, growing government deficits. She was not afraid to come up with a set of highly questionable solutions like draining away education funds, playing havoc with income taxes and a tax on consumption in particular, boosting privatization program which embraced utility companies and government-controlled industries. She fought with the influence of trade unions and with incessant biting from the Labor Party.
No matter how dubious her methods were, there is no-one who could gainsay that she had been a formidable figure in the British history, closing the door in the face of socialism and delegating more power to private enterprising and market-oriented economy. Thatcher took a sturdy stand in 1982 at the time of the Falklands war, and she was named by Soviet Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev as one of the world leaders instrumental in putting an end to the Cold War.
But Thatcher, nicknamed the Iron Lady, had many biographic trivia during her busy career that may have got lost behind her more public actions. Do you know that she
- had father who was a grocer?
- liked Rudyard Kipling’s poetry over all other?
- participated in a political campaign at the age of 10?
- played the piano?
- majored in chemistry at Oxford and embarked on her career as a tester for a food company, working with ice creams and cake ingredients?
- had twins Mark and Carol in 1953?
- was called “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher” for her scandalous decision to stop giving free milk to schoolchildren when she was education secretary in the 1970s?
- could have died in October 1984 in a bombing attack at the Brighton Grand Hotel where the Irish Republican Army wanted to blow up a Conservative Party conference. The bomb took away the lives of 5 people, and 34 were hospitalized with injuries?
- was portrayed in films and TV shows about 50 times, as can be established by browsing the Internet Movie Database. Meryl Streep, Patricia Hodge, Greta Scacchi, and Jennifer Saunders are among those who played her part. The most outstanding performance was arguably the Thatcher puppet on the British satirical show Spitting Image that featured there for 12 years. The voice of the puppet belonged to a man, comic Steve Nallon, whose impersonation is regarded one of the least flattering and most accurate?
- will not have a state funeral, but a funeral with honors, one like Princess Diana had.
