I never had the opportunity to meet Margaret Thatcher. But I was a big fan.
I did have the opportunity to meet several times with someone who was her close ally, and who worked with her on the international stage – President Ronald Reagan. In fact, if you click on the video below, you can hear Ronald Reagan say some nice things about me when I first ran for Congress 25 years ago. (You may have seen this video before, but hey, when you’ve got a clip of Ronald Reagan saying something nice about you, you can never play it enough!)
Anyway, back to Prime Minister Thatcher.
When she took over as head of government in Great Britain, that once-great nation was a mess. Things had gotten so bad that Britain was being referred to at the time as “the sick man of Europe,” a pejorative term which had previously been used to describe the now-defunct Ottoman Empire.
Labor unions were basically running the country. Strikes occurred on an ongoing basis – effectively destroying the economy. Unemployment was nearly 14%. Inflation was skyrocketing. The entire country was unraveling.
Margaret Thatcher’s unwavering belief in less government, free markets, and personal responsibility, rather than the welfare state, made all the difference. And she had the courage to fight for her convictions, no matter what was said about her by her political enemies.
She reduced the top income tax in Great Britain from 98% to 40% (still too high for my way of thinking, but a lot better than 98%!) She reigned in the unions. She brought the nearly 14% unemployment rate down to just over 5%.
On the international front, she successfully stood up to the military dictatorship in Argentina which had seized the British-owned Falkland Islands, and reclaimed this British territory. She and Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II are most responsible for the bloodless victory over the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. And she famously warned George H. W. Bush not to “go wobbly” when liberating Kuwait from the clutches of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. (He didn’t.)
Ronald Reagan’s widow, Nancy, issued a statement following news of Margaret Thatcher’s death saying her husband, Ronnie, and Thatcher were “political soul mates.” And they were. Now they’re both gone. But both countries are better, in fact the whole world is, because of these two political soul mates.
After leaving office, Margaret Thatcher served for seven years as Chancellor of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. William and Mary has strong ties to Great Britain. It was named after King William and Queen Mary of England. The college was given its royal charter by the King and Queen in 1693, (83 years before the Declaration of Independence – coincidently written by Thomas Jefferson, who had been a student at William and Mary.) It is the second oldest college in America (Harvard being a few years older.)
I bring all this up because last week Congress was not in session and my wife and I spent a few days in Williamsburg. Being a 1975 graduate of the College of William and Mary myself, I walked through one of the buildings on campus, the Wren Building, which happens to be the oldest college building still in use in America. When I was a student at William and Mary I had an English class in the Wren Building. Anyway, as I walked through the Wren Building, I noticed on the wall a painting of Chancellor Margaret Thatcher. I snapped a picture of it, and I share it with you below. I had no idea that within a few days, she’d pass into history.
God bless Margaret Thatcher.
