Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, dubbed the “Iron Lady,” was a game-changing conservative who set a new path for her nation when England was down and out, with her style of tough talk and action targeting those she thought weren’t pulling their weight.
“Thatcher came in and very determinedly said, all this is going to stop, and Britain is going to be a more competitive place,” said Graham Wilson, chairman of the Boston University Department of Political Science, who grew up in England and focused his early research on the Thatcher era. “She was a radical and wanted to change things, and she was a tremendously strong prime minister.”
Thatcher died of a stroke yesterday after a long battle with dementia. She was 87. Wilson said Thatcher’s upbringing as a grocer’s daughter influenced her as she rose to the highest levels of the English elite and led to her willingness to shake up not only organized labor and her political opponents, but also British legal and financial interests closer to home.
Her initiatives took time to take hold, but ultimately improved the country’s standing after a long period of economic decline.
“A lot of people in her own party thought it was going to be an absolute disaster, but she pulled it off,” Wilson said. “It became a much richer country than it was when she took office in 1979.” Even succeeding Labor Party leaders became grudging admirers and adopted some of her economic policies in later years.
Boston College political scientist Marc Landy said in many ways Thatcher pioneered the path that Ronald Reagan later followed.
“She was the first important leader from a major country who reversed the expansion of the welfare state. Even in some ways she cut it back. That’s historic. No one else had done that,” Landy said.
He said Thatcher was one of the toughest leaders of the 20th century, comparable to Winston Churchill, and remains a compelling personality to admirers and detractors alike.
“To see someone so open in terms of her politics and so concerned with principle, I don’t necessarily agree with what she stood for, but I find her so admirable,” Landy said.
Her determination also inspired vitriolic personal opposition magnified by her gender, Wilson said. “The IRA terrorism started long before her prime ministership, but she certainly was an object of it,” with a bombing near her in a hotel and the death of one of her closest advisers.
Boston’s British Consul General Susie Kitchens remembered Thatcher as an inspiration to younger women in England, showing they could aspire to the highest office in the land.
“What she did was make women in the political setting entirely normal in the United Kingdom,” Kitchens said. “I think her passing is going to begin an increase in interest in her legacy.”
