Margaret Thatcher was certainly an interesting person:
Born Margaret Roberts on Oct. 13, 1925, in the Lincolnshire market town of Grantham to Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, Mrs. Thatcher was schooled from an early age in an ethic of hard work and self-reliance. She grew up in a house with no hot water and an outdoor toilet. Her father, a Methodist lay preacher, was active in local politics and a major early influence.
“He taught her, don’t go with the herd if you think that the herd is wrong,” said Sir Bernard Ingham, who served as Mrs. Thatcher’s press secretary for 11 years.
His interest in politics also provided the books and newspapers which would stimulate her own. The brutalities of World War II and the accounts of a young Austrian Jew for whom her father had arranged shelter in Grantham filled her with a hate of all totalitarianism. She later recalled in her autobiography that as a 13-year-old she took on a group of adults, to their “astonishment”, in a prewar fish-and-chip shop queue after one said that at least Adolf Hitler had given Germany back its self-respect.
Mrs. Thatcher attended local state schools at a time when Conservative politicians were still mainly drafted from Britain’s elite private schools. She studied chemistry at Oxford University and spent her early career in research laboratories.
Mrs. Thatcher took power following Britain’s “winter of discontent” of 1978-1979, in which nationwide strikes over pay by public-sector workers from gravediggers to garbage men brought an economy that had for years been growing at half the rate of its peers close to a standstill. In her first two years as prime minister, the nation’s economy shrank and unemployment rose by a million, hovering at three million until the mid-1980s. There was widespread rioting in inner cities as both these conditions and racial tensions fermented dissent.
I can recall watching a documentary on punk rock’s early days, where the situation in England was clearly dreadful, with garbage piled up between buildings, and I found it odd that everyone seemed to blame some kind of conservative Establishment.