Former Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher has died today after suffering a stroke, aged 87.
Britain’s first and only female political leader passed away peacefully this morning, after suffering from poor health for more than a decade.
Baroness Thatcher had been staying at the Ritz Hotel in Central London for several months, but it is not known if she died there.
Her spokesman Lord Bell said: ‘It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning’.
Her daughter Carol dashed from her home in the Alps to London on Sunday morning to be by her mother’s side before she died.
Margaret Hilda Thatcher was born on 13 October 1925 in the Lincolnshire market town of Grantham. Her father, Alfred Roberts, was a shopkeeper who subsequently became mayor of the town. He and his wife Beatrice were devout Methodists and had met through the church: together they became an embodiment of lower-middle class respectability, saving to buy the shop that was their livelihood and working long hours with few holidays to make a living.
Daily Mail Reports;
From the moment that Margaret Thatcher defeated Willie Whitelaw to become leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975 she was making history. Then, she was the first woman ever to lead a political party in Britain. Four years later, she became the country’s first woman prime minister. By the time she left office in November 1990 she had changed the face of the country for ever, and become one of the most famous world statesmen of the 20th century.
Her achievement lay in breaking a post-war consensus between politicians, management and the trade unions about how our country was to be run. That consensus, as Mrs Thatcher well knew, had led to inexorable decline as Britain lagged behind her main trading partners in Europe and America.
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