Seldom did a nickname feel so apt. Margaret Thatcher bent her foes – Tory sexists, trade union leaders, Argentine generals, Irish republicans, Soviet premiers – to her will. Armoured with a conviction she was right, she charged into one battle after another, slaying orthodoxy and precedents. What was this if not the work of an Iron Lady?
Thatcher unleashed a revolution in the 1980s that transformed Britain’s political economy, jolted Europe’s left-leaning consensus and emboldened her great ally Ronald Reagan. She widened the Great Man theory of history to include women, and fortified it. Epochal events bore her stamp.
