Margaret Thatcher dead at 87

Margaret Thatcher, Britain's 'Iron Lady' Prime Minister, dead at 87. : See more at: http://gulfnews.com/gntv

Transcript

00:00Margaret Thatcher is dead. For those brought up when Britain's first woman Prime Minister

00:08was in her heyday, her passing feels unreal, despite her 87 years, despite her long-running

00:14battle with illness. In the end, a woman who once seemed invincible, who would never back

00:18down, succumbed, after a decade-long battle with illness, to a stroke. But how could she

00:22be dead? This was a woman made of iron, a woman that single-handedly changed the landscape

00:27of British politics. Margaret Thatcher moved Britain out of two decades of socialism, breaking

00:32the Union's hold over Britain for good, for ill. The problem with socialism, she said,

00:36is that eventually you run out of other people's money. It's a lesson Europe, arguably, could

00:40still be learning from. She was the United Kingdom's last true conviction politician.

00:46This lady was not for turning. Some worshipped Margaret Thatcher as a moderniser, who transformed

00:50the country. Others accused her of entrenching the divide between the rich and the poor.

00:55She led the Conservatives to three election victories, governing from 1979 to 1990, the

01:00longest continuous period in office by a British Prime Minister since the early 19th century.

01:05With US President Ronald Reagan, she formed a strong alliance against communism. Reagan

01:09called her the best man in England. In 1982, Thatcher dispatched a naval task force to

01:14the Falkland Islands, which had been seized by Argentina. The British eventually reclaimed

01:19the South Atlantic Islands. A total of 649 Argentines and 255 British troops had died.

01:26Margaret Thatcher suffered a series of mild strokes in late 2001 and 2002. Her decline

01:31into dementia was chronicled in an Oscar-winning film, The Iron Lady. Meryl Streep was cast

01:36as a bewildered widow, a very lonely Iron Lady, left only with her memories.