Prime minister says people have failed to appreciate 'thickness of glass ceiling she broke through'
David Cameron has paid tribute to Margaret Thatcher as a remarkable leader who "defined and overcame the challenges of the age" and who had earned her place alongside David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee in the pantheon of great British prime ministers.
Not only had she won three elections and served longer than any other prime minister for more than 150 years, he told the Commons, she had also become "our first and, so far, our only female prime minister".
Cameron said people sometimes failed to appreciate the "thickness of the glass ceiling she broke through" as the daughter of a Lincolnshire grocer, and forgot that she had spent her whole premiership under direct, personal threat from the IRA, losing two of her closest friends, Airey Neave and Ian Gow, to terrorism.
Despite being "only inches away from death" when the IRA bombed the Grand hotel in Brighton in 1984, said Cameron, it was entirely characteristic of Thatcher that she "shook off the dust" and gave a great speech about the need for democracy to stand up to terrorism.
She was, he added, a woman of "great contrasts"; formidable in public and yet "faultlessly kind" to her staff and devoted to her family.
"She was a remarkable type of leader," he said, "who said very clearly, 'I'm not a consensus politician but a conviction politician.'"
Among her simple philosophical watchwords, said the prime minister, were such phrases as "sound money", "strong defence" and "liberty under the rule of law".
He also spoke of her love for, and commitment to, debate in the House of Commons, and remembered the fear he felt when tasked with helping her prepare for prime minister's questions as a young Tory researcher in the 1980s. He recalled a junior minister rushing to a meeting and being told: "Rome wasn't built in a day." Yes, replied the minister, "but Margaret Thatcher wasn't the foreman on that job".
Cameron also reminded the house that things would have been very different had the then Margaret Roberts not been turned down for a job at ICI because she was "headstrong, obstinate and dangerously opinionated". All of those qualities, he said, he been put to use for the benefit of the country, and had helped her break the state's grip on many areas of British life in the 1980s.
Nor, he added, was she one "to shy away from the fight": her commitment to democracy and freedom, said Cameron, had helped bring freedom to Kuwait, to those parts of central and eastern Europe that were once "trapped behind the iron curtain", and, of course, to the Falkland Islands.
At her funeral next week, said the prime minister, Thatcher's coffin would be "draped with the flag that she loved … in a fitting salute to a great prime minister".
He concluded: "Let this be her epitaph: she made the country great again."
Responding, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said that at every stage in her life, Thatcher "broke the mould".
He said: "Having broken so many conventions as a woman, it can't be a coincidence that she was someone who in so many other areas of life was willing to take on the established orthodoxies.
"Margaret Thatcher's ability to overcome every obstacle in her path is just one measure of her personal strength. And that takes me to her style of politics.
"You can disagree with Margaret Thatcher. But it is important to understand the kind of political leader she was. What was unusual was that she sought to be rooted in people's daily lives but she also believed that ideology mattered.
"Not for her the contempt sometimes heaped on ideas and new thinking in political life.
"And while she never would have claimed to be, or wanted to be seen as, an intellectual, she believed, and she showed, that ideas matter in politics."
Miliband set out areas where he agreed with Thatcher – in recognising the nation's aspiration, in economic reform, in foreign policy and particularly the Falklands and in her understanding about climate change.
"But it would be dishonest and not in keeping with the principles that Margaret Thatcher stood for, even on this day, not to be open with this house about the strong opinions and the deep divisions there were, and are, over what she did," he went on.
"In mining areas, like the one I represent, communities felt angry and abandoned. Gay and lesbian people felt stigmatised by measures like section 28, which today's Conservative party has rightly repudiated."
Miliband concluded: "Whatever your view of her, Margaret Thatcher was a unique and towering figure. I disagree with much of what she did. But I respect what her death means to the many, many people who admired her. And I honour her personal achievements.
"On previous occasions, we have come to this house to remember the extraordinary prime ministers who have served our nation. Today, we also remember a prime minister who defined her age."
via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/10/thatcher-defined-challenges-age-cameron
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