I played Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, David Cameron – four Prime Ministers. If Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister I would find it difficult that I would not be allowed to play him because of the colour of his skin.
Anything I could have done that was legal to get Margaret Thatcher’s government out I was prepared to do. I could not believe what she was doing to this country.
Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots – yet couldn’t understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev’s broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism.
It was here in Edinburgh that in the 1980s I joined with many others to protest against Margaret Thatcher as she arrived to address the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
My only thought about Margaret Thatcher is the same one I had about Ronald Reagan. I hated a lot of what they did, but once in a while a country just needs a change.
After Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, I spoke at a tribute meeting organised by her supporters in a pub next to St Paul’s.
Remember how Margaret Thatcher came to believe that abroad was more important than at home? Didn’t do her much good.
Spare me this sanctimony about politeness, please. There are millions of people in this country who hate the very word ‘Thatcher’ and ‘Thatcherism,’ which continues until this day.
I grew up in a very political household. My mum used to shout at the television. At Mrs. Thatcher.
But let me tell you, this gender thing is history. You’re looking at a guy who sat down with Margaret Thatcher across the table and talked about serious issues.
Harveys opened against the backdrop of Thatcher’s greed culture.
Thatcher was the motivation for my entire political career. I hated everything she stood for.
In my immigrant family we revered Margaret Thatcher. She was aspiration personified. She understood what it took to smash the glass ceiling. She shared our values and she empathised with our experiences. She really was the first British Asian Prime Minister.
‘Eureka’ was very bad timing. The early 1980s: Reagan and Thatcher were in, greed was good, and here was a film about the richest man in the world who still couldn’t be happy. Politically and sociologically, it was out of step.
Watching the Commons tribute to Margaret Thatcher was like being suffocated inside a gigantic sticky toffee pudding, but one with nasty bogeys planted inside. There was much of the ‘Margaret Thatcher who was lucky enough to know me,’ especially from her own side of the House.
Two famous happy warriors – Reagan and his political soulmate, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – knew they were fighting their own ideological and external wars. But they did so with the sunny dispositions and positive outlooks of those who knew they were on the right side of history.
No British politician has ever been more despised by the British people than Margaret Thatcher.
If I were transported into my father’s shoes, I would have been a Labour supporter, too, because in the 1960s and even in the 1970s, the Conservatives weren’t standing up for working people; there was too much of an interest in corporatism, and that didn’t start to change till Margaret Thatcher came along.
The BBC sports department when I was there was seriously to the right of Ghengis Khan, and if people think I am strange, they should have met some of the production staff I worked with. Margaret Thatcher and the Queen were the pin up girls for many of them.
I grew up under Thatcher. I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless. Then gradually over the years it occurred to me that this was actually a very convenient myth for the state.
Margaret Thatcher was as viscerally hated at home as she was warmly respected abroad.
My entire life, socially, was all around the Maggie era. That was the great challenge as a Sex Pistol was how to deal with Margaret Thatcher. I think we did rather good.
Once upon a time – in the days of Margaret Thatcher and John Major – I would have rejoiced in a Conservative Party landslide in Britain. But now, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s victory fills me with fear and foreboding.
Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s most controversial modern politician.
Under Thatcher, who ruled us with an iron rod, great art was made. Amazing designers and musicians. Acid house was born. Very colourful and progressive.
For good or for ill, Britain is in some respects moving away from a prime-ministerial system towards a presidential one. This is emphatically not, as is sometimes argued, simply a function of Tony Blair’s personal ambition. The shift towards a more presidential style was already visible under Margaret Thatcher.
What we used to have in Britain was professions, and then we had industry. Then at some point, maybe with Margaret Thatcher, we suddenly industrialised our professions. And now we have lawyers with products and banks with products, and lecturers and teachers with products.
Thatcher was the best politician I have ever witnessed.
I was out of the U.K. as a care-free, fun-loving student for much of Mrs. Thatcher’s time in Downing Street, and as I didn’t own a television in New York, never read the newspapers, and am old enough to have lived before the Internet, she is a shadowy figure in my memory.
One of the reasons that Thatcher promoted home ownership is that it promoted responsible citizens with a stake in society. But another reason was that those people would tend to be Conservative.
It is good to see women doctors and lawyers and executives. I can visualize a woman president. If I were British, I would have supported Margaret Thatcher. But no benefit to anyone can come from women serving in combat.
The first two Prime Ministers whom I served, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher drew strikingly different lessons from the Second World War.
The world is undoubtedly a safer, freer place because Thatcher – like Reagan – refused to back down when it came to defending freedom.
When New Labour came to power, we got a Right-wing Conservative government. I came to realise that voting Labour wasn’t in Scotland’s interests any more. Any doubt I had about that was cast aside for ever when I saw Gordon Brown cosying up to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.
She felt Britain should not be so dependent on coal. She was in favour of building up nuclear energy to break the dependence on coal, and the main opposition to nuclear came from the environment movement. Mrs. Thatcher thought she could trap them with the carbon emissions argument.
Feminists don’t honor successful women. You never hear them talking about Margaret Thatcher. Take Condoleezza Rice. She’s a remarkable, successful woman. You don’t hear the feminists talk about her or Carly Fiorina or Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
Under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., there was a rewriting of the basic rules of capitalism. These two governments changed the rules governing labour bargaining, weakening trade unions, and they weakened anti-trust enforcement, allowing more monopolies to be created.
I have an ambivalent relationship with Margaret Thatcher. She came to power in May 1979 – a month before my 11th birthday. I was far too young to have developed a great deal of political awareness. I remember it, though – my mother excited at the dinner table because Britain had its first female prime minister.
Margaret Thatcher was a lady. I suppose she was a woman in a man’s world, but that’s about the only nice thing I have to say.
I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game; otherwise, she’d make mincemeat of you.
Prime ministers come and go, but so long as he or she lives, the sovereign remains, receiving and reading all state papers and meeting once a week with the prime minister to advise, enquire, and comment – sometimes sharply, as was the case with Queen Elizabeth II and Mrs. Thatcher – on affairs of state.
Any criticism of Thatcher throws a dangerously absurd light on the entire machinery of British politics. Thatcher’s name must be protected, not because of all the wrong that she had done, but because the people around her allowed her to do it.
As a young woman, I was fortunate to have the leadership of Jeanette Hayner, the courage of Jennifer Dunn, the faith of Elisabeth Elliot, and the indomitable spirit of Margaret Thatcher to guide and motivate me.
A conveyor belt of Think Tank pundits and allied operatives poured into the TV studios, and together they built a fortress around Mrs. Thatcher’s memory that was rooted in theories about economics. They did this because economics is the only language that wonks understand.
We’ve never considered ourselves overtly political, but when it comes to English politics – people like Margaret Thatcher – you cannot just stand by and ignore all that’s happening around us.
Margaret Thatcher and John Major knew that bluff and bravado doesn’t work in Brussels.
In the 1980s, Thatcher hacked away at our trade unions and abolished the Greater London Council.
My Dad always maintained that although Mrs. Thatcher did not look like us, she absolutely thought like us. He referred to her as the first British Asian Prime Minister. Because she shared our core values and beliefs.
