Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'A unique personality' that was published in Newsband

A unique personality

Margaret Thatcher was dismissed by Tory grandees as a mere Grantham grocer's daughter. People of Britain didn’t have a high opinion about her the first time they saw her. But impressions changed dramatically when Thatcher started to speak. There was something about her delivery that forced you to listen. There was a lot more to her content that made you sit up and think. But, above all, her passion and conviction would steal the day. And at last she made it to the top and even dominated British politics.

After that, there arrived a time when she was at the crest of her political power and her position was unchallenged. Margaret Thatcher set the agenda for the past three and a half decades of British politics. All the debates that matter today in the public arena, whether in economics, social policy, politics, the law, the national culture or this country's relations with the rest of the world, still bear something of the imprint she left on them in her years in office between 1979 and 1990. Just as in life she shaped the past 30 years, so in death she may well continue to shape the next 30. These are claims that can be made about no other modern British prime minister. She was in many ways the most formidable peacetime leader Britain has had since Gladstone.

Mrs Thatcher was Britain's first and so far only woman major party leader, chosen entirely on merit, and then Britain's first woman prime minister although she came from a petit-bourgeois background, a shopkeeper's daughter.

Mrs Thatcher's transcendent quality, however, was that she was a political warrior. She had a love of political combat, a zealotry for the causes she believed in, a reluctance to listen to advice, a conviction that she was always right and never wrong, and a scorn for consensus that set her apart from almost all her predecessors.

Mrs Thatcher was brave enough to go for Falklands war of 1982. The result was an astonishing and absurd military triumph followed by an electoral one, which elevated Mrs Thatcher from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Her dethroning of trade union power was impressive. Her economic policy was remarkable.

Her rule was marked by the most serious urban riots of the 20th century, one of the most divisive strikes in recent times, and the century's most audacious prime ministerial assassination attempt, which thankfully she survived.

Thus Mrs Thatcher was a unique personality and very rarely a leader like her has emerged in the history of mankind.