margaret thatcher speech writer

But she also provided great material. "Fatcha" was an instant punchline back then: simply saying it was enough to get a laugh. She lavished praise on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, and laid out the . wrong with politics? Her centralism, unequalled in Europe, descended under Blair into a morass of targetry, inefficiency and endless reorganisation. She may have got it slightly wrong. Her onslaught on the trade unions left those movements pale imitations of their former selves, too weak to resist the drive to the "flexible labour market" which has seen Britain become the home of what one senior Labour figure calls "crappy jobs", with low pay and no protection. Opponents and supporters of Margaret Thatcher will never agree about the value of her legacy, but as for her importance, her hypnotic hold on us, they are bound to find common ground. But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation. Exactly the same is true of Thatcher. She showed that modern prime ministers can still mark out room for individual manoeuvre. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. But Labour is no less in thrall. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week). Now it was the turn of the words, and no one, of course, would, against all the odds, do them better than the lady who, 25 years before, once thought the sky was beyond her limit. By 1990 it was transformed. The economic crisis that Britain faced had been created not by the working class itself, these wholesome people that Sir Keith remembered from his vac weeks in Barnsley, but by a working-class leadership that was determined to bring the whole system crashing down. The jobs that went during the 80s tended to be good, skilled jobs, delivering decent incomes and some security. I was just behind her at the civic museum in Dubrovnik when the local guide explained a model showing the elaborate system of ancient wells and tunnels that had provided the city with fresh water no matter how fierce the siege. Gaze at the telephone. Between 1945-90 every statement made by Margaret Thatcher is listed, In her speech, Thatcher used rhetorical techniques to show the strength and principles of Reagan and project those values onto the American people. From 1987 to 1988, he was a senior policy writer and speechwriter in 10 Downing Street for Margaret Thatcher when she was British prime minister and remained close to her up to her death.. O'Sullivan served from 2008-2012 as vice-president and executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio . The Thatcher government was across all the details of this shipment. The Cameron generation wrongly see in the 1980s a revolution to emulate, starting with an economic crisis just like hers, as a chance to reshape everything. Today's Tories walk in Thatcher's footsteps, battling with their estranged cousins in Ukip over who is the rightful heir to her Eurosceptic legacy. Thatcher's reputation never recovered from the ruthless budgets of 1980 and 1981, or her insensitivity to colleagues. The state retained control of some nationalised industries the railways, for example but BT, British Airways, British Steel, British Gas and the British Airports Authority were among the big companies sold off. We watched as her high heels went click-click-click across the stones of the Acropolis and the cement floors of Tito's steel mills. It is odd to reflect that in Thatcher's time, the British novel enjoyed a comparatively lively resurgence. Feminists disowned her by insisting that though she was a woman, she was not a sister. Draining down those 11 years to their memorable essence, what does one light upon? Britain's record on innovation and investment have been extremely poor, while the hollowing out of manufacturing left the economy over-dependent on the de-regulated City. In the 80s, she was the primary force behind what was known then as alternative comedy and is now simply called "comedy". Margaret Thatcher might seem to some like an unlikely pioneer of the need for climate action but, in the late 1980s, she made a series of remarkable speeches and interventions on the subject and . As the authorised biographer of Margaret Thatcher, I was given special permission by the Cabinet Secretary to see government papers not yet released to the public.For . The family silver was squandered on bribing voters rather than modernising the economy. This, too, we still live with. She was able to reach We have his example. . She was right, he was wrong. And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. Original, independent voices such as BBC director general Alasdair Milne were brutally silenced. After leaving office, MT widened and deepened her criticism of the European announced that White The welfare state set out to ensure that no one, in the UK at least, would starve or freeze to death, or suffer or die for lack of medical or other care. The truth is less significant than the alteration to it. In a world where most media talking heads come from the top few percent of income earners, unions are not only important in wage bargaining, they also provide some of the few well-informed voices whose job it is to speak on behalf of the less well-paid. "We have not After the Dublin European Council in November 1979 she began a long battle At a party leaders' meeting in Washington, DC in 1985, Prime Minister Thatcher spent all day in the House of Commons, then boarded Concorde and flew to Washington to participate until late into the evening; she took such policy co-operation very seriously. The drastic results of these policies were intentional. at Brighton, insisting that the Conference go on and In 1979 she inherited a nation that was the "sick man of Europe", an object of constant transatlantic ridicule. Which raises the question: why isn't this happening now? She was catapulted into the Conservative leadership by a small group of ideologues centred around a thinktank, determined to roll back the statist ideas that dominated Britain after the postwar Attlee government. Meeting Gorbachev for the first time in December 1984 she declared: "We Thatcher's 11 years of dictating British policy in Ireland was a legacy of bitterness and entrenched division. Margaret Thatcher was Britain's most significant leader since Churchill. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Underestimating Ronald Reagan was an error committed by many of his critics and opponents; Reagan never minded a bit, thinking that being underestimated yielded him a significant advantage. The stance was often in broadest terms, more moral than political. On taking office she showered money on public sector unions, and her "cuts" were only to planned increases, mild compared with today's. This does lead to divisions. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, Plus there's the fact that comedy is now a big business, and there's less money in sharp satire than gentle observation. Thatcher answered that question, re-energising the concept of democratic leadership. In November 1978, Hannaford and I organized a European fact-finding tour for Reagan, and the first stop was London. Reagan and Thatcher first met in 1975, as my friend and colleague Peter Hannaford reminded me just today. It is not true that Thatcher didn't care about the media. speech in the House of Commons on 5 February 1960 and gave her Shoot-to-kill actions by British forces also significantly increased. In the three years prior to receiving these weapons the loyalist death squads killed 34 people. The Cameron and Osborne circle are crude copies carried away with the dangerous idea that conviction is all it takes to run a country. In the 2011 biographical drama film "The Iron Lady," Meryl Streep plays the role of Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Not even the Falklands war would push it off the tracks or damage it in any way. And we won back three we lost at by-elections. At its best, that has meant a mood of freedom and choice that has made these islands a brighter, less drab place than they once were. drew an important moral from the Falklands war: "We have ceased to The lady was too shrewd to try that, and barely succeeded in reducing the share of the national income taken by the public sector. On Sunday, looking down at the waterfront, I could see how these had been replaced by a housing estate, a supermarket, and sometimes by nothing at all. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist. From the invention of the term "sado-monetarism" through to the way her powerful ministers seemed to swoon before her, and the constant negative reiteration by her critics of her femininity, or lack of it, she exerted a glacial hold over the (male) nation's masochistic imagination. She, for one, never underestimated her friend from California, then a state of some 24 million. 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. Bernard Ingham, journalist and civil servant. They married the personality and belief to action. One of the few direct hits scored in the modern era was when Alex Ross and James Herring remixed Nick Clegg's bizarre "I'm sorry" speech and turned it into a hilarious R&B tune. And he would credit the contribution of Helmut Kohl, who rose to power in Germany in part because of the influence of Thatcher and Reagan. Respected, viewed with awe, a conviction politician, but if liking came into it, that was an accident. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, replied Following several small strokes she announced, in March 2002, that her career as a speechmaker had ended. I don't see that. The pomp and circumstance that will crown her funeral was proffered by Brown, to some shudders from his own side. A big decline in traditional industries took place across Europe and the US in the 80s and 90s. It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher held the office of Prime . Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday honours for "services to the study of Economics". As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. When the late Christopher Hitchens was a political reporter for the New Statesman, he corrected the prime minister on a point of fact, and she was quick to correct Hitchens in turn. This was her last important public statement. Look inside your own house, at the water coming out of the tap: once a public utility but, after Thatcher, the property of private companies, many foreign-owned. For Thatcher it all ended months later in November 1990 when she was forced to resign. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. As far as her supporters are concerned, this radical transformation worked. Her imitators swerve all over the place, with 37 U-turns at the Telegraph's latest count on matters from forests and pasties to buzzard nests and caravans.