Love Her or Hate Her, Thatcher Saved Britain

I always found it hard to judge Mrs. Thatcher dispassionately, because she was so like my mother. They looked and sounded similar—shortish urgent women who moved with purpose. From large hair, their faces narrowed downward; they had receding chins that appeared weak and strong at once. Force of will made them courageously disagreeable. They were born two years apart (Thatcher in 1925, my mother in 1927), came from modest, fiercely principled Nonconformist religious backgrounds, and saw life as a ladder that everyone must climb, from evil to goodness, from error to correction, from the lower social classes to the higher ones. Estranged from their native accents, they spoke in their grander borrowed ones a little carefully—as if, having learned their elocution lessons, they were now giving them. Both women were complex feminists, of a kind, who didn’t use the term, preferred men to women, and coddled their sons over their daughters. And both powerful women married supportive men named Denis.