via BBC News
Privatisation, finance boom, manufacturing decline, home ownership, union laws. The UK changed hugely in the 1980s. But how much of that would have happened if Margaret Thatcher had never taken office, asks historian Dominic Sandbrook.
In the summer of 1970, a week after their local MP had joined the cabinet for the first time, the Finchley Press sent a journalist to interview her.
Did she, he wondered, fancy a crack at becoming Britain’s first woman prime minister? “No,” Margaret Thatcher said emphatically. “There will not be a woman prime minister in my lifetime – the male population is too prejudiced.”
We know now, of course, how wrong she was.
Indeed, the thought of Britain without Margaret Thatcher seems unimaginable today, especially for people of my generation. I was not yet five when she first walked into Downing Street as prime minister, and had just turned 16 when she resigned.
For my generation, whether you loved or loathed her, she was always there, a fact of life. But she was not merely the dominant political personality of her generation – she was a transcendent cultural figure who inspired more songs, books, plays and films than any other British leader since Oliver Cromwell.
As her biographer John Campbell astutely remarked, if you want to see her legacy, just look around.
Yet what was that legacy? Even now, more than 20 years after her tearful exit from No 10, Britain cannot agree. It is often said that she was the most divisive leader of the last century, which is almost certainly true.
