LONDON, March 22: Margaret Thatcher, the formidable Iron Lady who changed Britain for ever during a decade as prime minister, has finally been silenced — though by illness, not her political enemies.

Britain’s longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century, and its only female premier ever, withdrew from public life on Friday as failing health caught up with her.

A series of recent small strokes mean that Thatcher, 76, will never make public speeches again, her office said.

The revelation was hugely significant: though deposed as prime minister by her own party in November 1990, Thatcher has for more than a decade cast her inimitable shadow over the political scene, her regular outbursts ensuring that the troubled Conservative Party could never entirely be free of her legacy.

And some legacy it was.

From the day in May 1979 that she arrived at Downing Street with her ever-present handbag and the first in a long line of true-blue suits, Thatcher used no-nonsense rhetoric and a steely power over her male acolytes to take Britain the way she wanted it to go.

One of the few prime ministers to have an ideology named after her, Thatcherism was about the individual, about freedom and an end to class division, about less state and more private, about smashing anything that believed in collective power, from the unions to the Soviet bloc.

“There’s no such thing as society,” she once famously declared, and some individuals indeed prospered. Mass privatizations gave the man on the street the chance to join the ownership class. Business regarded her reforming zeal with almost religious reverence.

But others felt the sharp end of Thatcherism. Unemployment soared, the jobless grimly referring to themselves as one of “Maggie’s three million”. Miners striking against pit closures were crushed. And still today, many blame the lack of community spirit in Britain on Thatcher’s legacy.

But it could have been so different. Arguably Thatcher’s toughest test occurred early in her tenure, when in 1982 a handful of Argentine commandos invaded some obscure islands in the South Atlantic that happened to be British.

“Thatcher was personally identified with the Falklands war,” recalled Dr Alan Sked, an expert in postwar British history.

“It completely transformed her and Britain’s reputation on the world stage and showed that we weren’t going to be pushed around,” he said. “Once you fight a war as prime minister people see you differently. You are taken seriously.”

Thatcher certainly was taken seriously after the conflict, crushing Labour in 1983 polls, and then taking on the miners, the unions and the left-wing run Greater London Council in quick succession.—AFP