The purpose of this paper is to examine the life of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, discuss her strategies in her rise to power, examine her economic policies, personality preparation, public relations, opportunism and other factors which have led to her success. We will also look at her prospects for staying in power as the head of the British government.
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 had wrested the leadership of the Conservative party from Heath in 1975 she learned on the job; and when she came to power in 1979 there was no ideological blueprint for transforming Britain although she had been guided throughout by a strong certitude that whatever she is doing is morally right. The 1981 budget was her turning point. Keynes was stood on his head; taxes were lowered so as to curb public expenditure, even though unemployment was rising sharply...