Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, Lincolnshire, daughter of a Methodist grocer. Her father — a strict, anti-statist local politician — shaped her work ethic. She read chemistry at Oxford, worked briefly as a food chemist, taught herself law and qualified as a barrister in 1953. In 1951 she married Denis Thatcher; they had twins.

Elected MP for Finchley in 1959, she rose steadily in the Conservative Party. As education secretary under Heath (1970-74) she ended free school milk for older primary children, becoming "Thatcher, Milk Snatcher." In 1975 she challenged Heath and became the first woman to lead a major British party. A 1976 Soviet Red Star piece on her hard line gave her the name "Iron Lady."

In May 1979, after the "Winter of Discontent," the Conservatives won a landslide and Thatcher became Western Europe's first elected female head of government. Thatcherism reversed Britain's post-war Keynesian welfare-state path: monetarism, privatisation of BT, British Gas and British Steel, deregulation and tax cuts. After painful structural adjustment the economy revived and the City of London regained its place as a world financial centre.

In April 1982 Argentina invaded the Falklands; she dispatched a task force that retook them in 74 days. The 1984-85 miners' strike — a year-long showdown with NUM leader Arthur Scargill — ended in defeat for the union and a historic retreat for organised labour. From 1985 her close partnership with Reagan steered late Cold War diplomacy; she famously said of Gorbachev: "We can do business together."

Her record is not unmixed. Her reforms gutted traditional industrial regions; northern England and Welsh mining towns have not recovered. Her line on IRA hunger strikes, the Poll Tax disaster, and her warmth toward Pinochet draw lasting criticism. In November 1990 the Poll Tax and a Cabinet revolt forced her resignation. She died on April 8, 2013, aged 87.