MARGARET THATCHER

Margaret Thatcher left a dark legacy that has still not disappeared

Days before he died in 2003, Guardian columnist and Thatcher biographer Hugo Young wrote an epitaph for the prime minister who changed Britain forever.

The first time I met Margaret Thatcher, I swear she was wearing gloves. The place was her office at the Department of Education, then in Curzon Street. Maybe my memory is fanciful. Perhaps she had just come inside.
But without any question, sitting behind her desk, she was wearing a hat. The time was 1973. This was the feminine creature who, two years later, was leader of the Conservative party. Steely, certainly. The milk snatcher reputation absorbed and lived with. Lecturing me about the comprehensive schools, of which she created more than any minister before or since. But a woman who, at the time, thought that chancellor was the top mark at which she might aim. Conscious of being a woman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. Indeed a person – with a chemistry that repelled almost all the significant males in Edward Heath's cabinet – who could never become the party leader.

Being a woman is undoubtedly one of the features, possibly the most potent, that makes her ascent to power memorable, 25 years on, in a way that applied to no man. Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Heath: they seem, by comparison, evanescent figures.
Thatcher is remembered for her achievements, but more for a presence, which was wrapped up with being a woman. Several strong women on the continent have risen to the top, but this British woman, in Britain of all places, became a phenomenon, first, through her gender.

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