The Life of Margaret Thatcher

The daughter of a grocer, Margaret Thatcher was brought up over the store, which is the closest thing the British have to the American log-cabin myth. In fact, her father was a well-to-do grocer, a moral pillar of the local community, and extremely ambitious for his daughter, who attended fee-paying schools and Oxford at his expense. She lacked nothing in political education. Few scions of the English nobility, however high their aspirations in the Conservative party, have been able to say the same. No thread of destiny ran through her early career as an aspirant politician. She was elected to Parliament in 1959 at the age of 34 and became the "statutory woman" in Edward Heath's cabinet between 1970 and 1974. It is the typical story of an ambitious politician marked by a mixture of self-serving loyalty and calculated opportunism (Elliott 14-16).

Much history had to be rewritten to accommodate the Thatcherite myth that the true Tory cause was destroyed by MacMillan and Heath and rescued by her efforts. There is little trace of "Thatcherism" in Thatcher's early career. Much of what she became after she

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rm after the Westland affair in 1986, which was her nearest equivalent to Watergate. Yet on each occasion she had sprung back to win landslide victories at the polls in 1983 and 1987. Admired and respected by most of the British for the qualities that had won back the Falkland Islands or faced down Arthur Scargill and his striking coal miners, Margaret Thatcher has never been much loved; she is the curious phenomenon of an unpopular populist. This time, however, there are differences. For all her time in office up to now she was spared effective parliamentary opposition. Since it went lurching to the left in 1980 the Labour party has been virtually unelectable. The attempt to form a new, non-socialist constellation on the center-left flourished briefly but served the purpose chiefly of dividing the forces of opposition under an electoral system which is hostile to third parties. By 1989, however, the centrist alliance of Liberals and Social Democrats had fallen apart in personal and sectarian disagreement, opening the way for Labour to move back into the center ground of British politics. This, under Neil Kinnock, head of the Labor party, it had been seeking to do, and it junked many of its socialist policies along with t
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Approximate Word count = 2669
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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