Margaret Thatcher was the woman who began the shift to the right that has affected almost all the countries of the West in the past three decades. But it is an open question whether even the crash of 2008 and the ensuing prolonged recession have finally ended the long reign of her ideas in Western politics.
"This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated," wrote some minion in the personnel department of British chemical giant ICI, rejecting young Margaret Roberts' application for a job as research chemist in 1948. She was fresh out of Oxford University, 23 years old, self-confident and absolutely full of opinions. She probably frightened the job interviewer half to death.
But she landed a job with a plastics company in Colchester in 1949. She joined the Conservative Party and stood for Parliament in the 1950 election (she was the youngest candidate ever), and married businessman Denis Thatcher in 1951. Margaret Thatcher, as she then became, finally made it into Parliament in the 1959 election.
She entered the Cabinet of Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1970 as the "statutory female" (as he gallantly put it). But she had the last laugh in 1975, replacing Heath as party leader after the Conservatives lost the 1974 election. She took a very hard line from the start, both in domestic and in foreign politics. Her open hostility to the Soviet Union led a Soviet newspaper in 1976 to dub her the "Iron Lady", a title in which she revelled.
Her real impact, however, was in British domestic politics, where she broke the welfare-state consensus that had dominated all the major parties for the previous 30 years. "It is our duty to look after ourselves," she said, and the political orthodoxy trembled before her onslaught.
