Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Hilda Thatcher (1925–2013) led the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990 and served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for eleven years, the longest continuous tenure in the office in the twentieth century. Trained as a chemist at Oxford and later as a barrister, she entered Parliament as MP for Finchley in 1959 and served as Secretary of State for Education and Science under Edward Heath before defeating him for the party leadership in 1975.

Her domestic programme, later labelled Thatcherism, combined monetarist economic policy, reductions in direct taxation, deregulation of financial markets, curbs on trade union power, and the privatisation of state-owned industries including British Telecom, British Gas, and British Airways. The 1984–85 miners' strike, in which her government defeated the National Union of Mineworkers led by Arthur Scargill, became a defining domestic confrontation. The introduction of the Community Charge, popularly called the "poll tax," provoked widespread protest and contributed to her party's loss of confidence in her leadership.

In foreign policy she allied closely with US President Ronald Reagan, took a hard line against the Soviet Union — earning the sobriquet "Iron Lady" from a Soviet newspaper in 1976 — and authorised the military operation that recovered the Falkland Islands from Argentine occupation in 1982. She negotiated the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration with Premier Zhao Ziyang on the return of Hong Kong, and signed the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement with Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald. She was a sceptic of deeper European integration; her 1988 Bruges speech set out objections that prefigured later Eurosceptic positions within her party.

Challenged for the leadership in November 1990 after the resignation of Geoffrey Howe, she withdrew after the first ballot and was succeeded by John Major. She was created Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in 1992 and sat in the House of Lords until her retirement.