She then steadily moved up the ministerial ranks, becoming secretary of state for education and science when the Conservatives retook power in Nonetheless, she was able to keep her job, and in , with the Conservatives back in the opposition, she defeated former Prime Minister Edward Heath to take over leadership of the party.
Thatcher was now one of the most powerful women in the world. She rejected the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, who advocated deficit spending during periods of high unemployment, instead preferring the monetarist approach of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. In April , Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands , a sparsely populated British colony located miles from Argentina and 8, miles from the United Kingdom.
Thatcher dispatched troops to the area. On May 2, a British submarine controversially sank an Argentine cruiser that was outside of an official exclusion zone, killing over people on board. Later in the month, British troops landed near San Carlos Bay in East Falkland and, despite persistent air attacks, were able to capture the capital of Port Stanley and end the fighting. The war and an improving economy propelled Thatcher to a second term in In what became a key part of her legacy, Thatcher also privatized British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, Rolls-Royce and a number of other state-owned companies.
On the foreign policy front, Thatcher often found herself allied with U. In Asia, meanwhile, she negotiated the eventual transfer of Hong Kong to the Chinese. In Africa she had a mixed record, facilitating the end of white minority rule in Zimbabwe but opposing sanctions against apartheid South Africa.
After Thatcher was elected to a third term in , her government lowered income tax rates to a postwar low. On November 14, , former Defense Minister Michael Heseltine challenged her for leadership of the party, partly due to differences of opinion on the European Union.
Credit: George Bush Presidential Library. Thatcher, who was one of the first female presidents of the Oxford University Conservative Association, gained the notice of the Conservative Party soon after her graduation. As a year-old, she was the youngest candidate to stand for a seat in the House of Commons during the election of Although defeated, she garnered considerable media attention and praise for cutting the Labour majority by a third.
She lost in Dartford again in , but she finally won a seat in Parliament after running in the staunchly Conservative district of Finchley in northern London in After marrying wealthy, divorced businessman Denis Thatcher in , Margaret gave up her scientific career. A prolonged boom in house prices took place along with a chronic shortage of affordable housing — yet to be resolved by a series of governments — and the gradual emergence of a culture of debt, incurred on the presumption that the value of property would keep rising.
In the private sector, rents soared. On the back of the housing boom, much of Britain mortgaged itself up to the hilt and household debt reached record levels. Winning the Falklands war in transformed Thatcher's standing in the opinion polls. Fighting it put the armed forces back on the centre stage for the first time since Suez. The Falklands revived the prestige of soldiering, as huge crowds gathered to wave off and welcome home the troops in Portsmouth. No one talks about abolishing private schools any more.
Unilateral nuclear disarmament is not embraced by any of the three main political parties. Losing three times to Thatcher led directly to the creation of New Labour and the emergence of Tony Blair as a leader who embraced her emphasis on choice, competition and an expanding role for the private sector in the economy.
Following the crash of , Labour under Ed Miliband has still to decide whether to make the break from that consensus. The observation that the Church of England amounts to "the Tory party at prayer" is thought to date to the 18th century. Thatcher's terms of office severely damaged that relationship, possibly beyond repair.
The publication in of the C of E report Faith in the City, A Call to Action by Church and Nation, caused an almighty political row between the church and the Conservative party which has reverberated to the present day.
Endorsed by Dr Robert Runcie, then archbishop of Canterbury, the document followed riots in Britain's inner cities. It was a cry of anguish over the dilapidated, alienated state of the inner cities, after years of recession, gloom and rising unemployment.
Relations between the Tories and the established church have never truly recovered. Thatcher saw the BBC licence fee as a tax imposed on television viewers irrespective of whether they wanted to watch BBC programmes or not. As prime minister, she believed that a leftwing bias permeated its coverage. During the Falklands war, rightwingers renamed the corporation the Stateless Persons Broadcasting Corporation — a dig at its refusal to describe British troops as "our" troops and Argentinian soldiers as "the enemy".
But the legacy of the Thatcher era has been to drag the BBC into a perpetual culture war. And she helped create Channel 4 in , probably not anticipating that it would popularise fiercely anti-establishment output. Defeat in the Falklands war signalled the end of the road for Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri Castelli, head of Argentina's last military dictatorship. Thatcher's friendship with Mikhail Gorbachev helped hasten the cold war to its end, as the economically moribund Soviet Union collapsed.
However, her refusal to back sanctions on apartheid South Africa, and description of Nelson Mandela as a "terrorist", arguably delayed the fall of that regime.
Margaret Thatcher: 20 ways that she changed Britain. From the economy to women's fashion, no PM in living memory has had such far-reaching influence on the social landscape.
From the start of her time as prime minister Margaret Thatcher divided opinion. When she came to power in she wanted to make big changes to how the country was run - and she transformed Britain. One of her biggest changes was that she wanted private companies and people, and not officials, to run government-owned things like British Gas and BT British Telecom.
She believed that private companies would run the services better. Thousands of ordinary people were able to buy their council houses, giving them more of a stake in society. Under her rule, the City of London became one of the world's most successful centres for banking and business. The tiny islands eight thousand miles away in the South Atlantic sea had been invaded by Argentina.
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