MARGARET THATCHER’S WORLD – MARTIN FARR

Margaret Thatcher and her team transformed Britain and persevered through years of necessary economic reform. As Western nations find themselves returning to the economic woes of the 1970s, is it time to revisit how Margaret Thatcher made a difference? Dr Martin Farr teaches modern and contemporary history at Newcastle University in the UK. His project over some years has been to compile a significant folio of how Margaret Thatcher influenced the world’s political thinking. On Monday 1 December 2025, Martin Farr addressed The Sydney Institute to reveal the world of Margaret Thatcher. The paper which follows is taken from an edited transcript of the speech on the night.

Monday 1 December 2025

MARGARET THATCHER’S WORLD

MARTIN FARR

My project to write a book about Margaret Thatcher’s world has gone on longer than her premiership. I keep being distracted, not least by visits to places like Sydney – very happily. But it is something I’m quite determined to complete while I’m able.

“Margaret Thatcher’s World” would be an account of Thatcher as a prime minister who, increasingly, as prime ministers do, became more involved in foreign relations. Who becomes, in many respects, the most recognisable statesperson in the world, one could say. Even while she was the only woman at an assemblage, at a summit, at a meeting. For that reason, the men generally deferred to her and allowed her to be in the middle.

And so, she was at the middle of these meetings in her resplendent outfits, which became more pronounced as her period in office went along. The shoulder pads ever sharper into the 1980s, and this is a way to stand out from the grey men around her.  It is about the way in which she influenced the world, and the way in which there is, essentially, an international history of Thatcherism.

My basic contention is that, very unusually for a Democratic leader rather than a totalitarian leader, there is an “ism” which is a serious ism about her name and her project. It is both a set of values, a set of policies and also a brand of leadership. This last one, arguably, is the most salient and has lasted the longest.

We had a wonderful conference in Melbourne last week about Robert Menzies, about whom I’m now an expert. I’m very fond of him. Not least because of the importance of cricket in his life and my life. We had a masterclass with cadets, which I enjoyed very much. And I asked them about Menzies in contemporary Australian society, and whether these younger people’s mates knew who he was? None of them did of course. Their parents have a generalised sense that he was around for a long time, rather than any clearer sense. Now, in one sense, that’s perfectly understandable; historical memory shifts, generations pass and things recede, and only really the likes of me bother reading about and thinking about people whose influence may well have waned. And about whom living memory may well have elapsed.

But with Margaret Thatcher, the memory is clearer. I can predict my students’ reactions to Thatcher by the length of their vowels. The longer the vowel, the more southern the person, and the more friendly and fonder the recall generated by their parents’ experience. The flatter the vows, the shorter the vowels, the more northerly and the experiences of unemployment, the industrialisation and strikes, rather than popular capitalism and privatisation and rising house prices have the reverse effect.

Thatcher’s political presence still lives in my undergraduates, their parents and their grandparents. It will be a long time for that to change, I suspect. Compared to Menzies, who was a largely unifying character overall in Australian history after the war, Thatcher was a divisive person. This is one of the anomalies that we have to explain when she won three elections despite being a divisive individual.

Indeed, reading foreign coverage of British politics at the time, the impression conveyed to readers was that she must have been popular because she was re-elected. In fact, our electoral system allows one to be unpopular and still be elected, as the current government is demonstrating with great proficiency on every occasion. In a famous obituarial cartoon, MT is dusting the world free of hammers and sickles.

I was very struck when she died in 2013. I was working on the second decade of this project, and there was a clear sense of how she impacted internationally. It is an American cartoon and it shows that her legacy was essentially freeing the world from Communism, which she would very much have liked as an obituary remark.

I’m also relieved that my project receives continual updates and refreshing from contemporary events. In the most recent, the new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who was known to me before she was elected, is regarded as being the next Margaret Thatcher.

I’ll return to this point in the talk, about how often women leaders anywhere in the world get compared with MT, favourably or unfavourably. The new Prime Minister of Japan has made much of her styling with Thatcher. Not least the fact that she gets by on four hours sleep a night, as MT famously did. The Thatcher narrative plays in so much of the coverage of her. Is she like Thatcher? How like Thatcher is she? Does she want to be like Thatcher? And, putting it very bluntly, a really important theme of this talk is that it’s evidence based. That there’s a speculation one could make about Thatcher and Thatcherism as an international brand, but it requires substantiation.

I’ll give you just a selection of the material I have, and I’ll end on some Australian dimensions as well. It’s really important that these are foreign sources rather than British sources. It’s striking. When you’re in a country, you read much more about what the country is doing. With my students, I do a foreign policy class when the American presidents are visiting. The papers are full of it. But read the American papers and you notice how little, or how much less there is of it. This was very noticeable with Trump’s second state visit to the UK two months ago.

Margaret Thatcher is all pervading though and she transforms handbag from a noun into a verb. This is not the least of her achievements. Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch conservative, says, “When I become prime minister, I’m going to buy one of those Margaret Thatcher handbags, and I’ll bang it on the table and demand my money back from the government.” To be hand bagged is an indication that you’ve had a meeting with MT. There are some particular individuals who follow the cult of Thatcher, and they’re quite into her handbags. And they can be viewed and touched at the Churchill Archive Centre, where her papers are. I’ve yet to go into the handbag area myself. I just stay with the documents and with a reputation.

An important part of this is the use of a feminine accoutrement as a weapon – the blending of “feminine attributes” in a masculinised way. Using this as an offensive weapon, rather than merely, as her late Majesty would use, as something to occupy her hands as she meets delegates. That is something which comes across in the evidence as well. There is a branding of the style of leadership and the almost masculinised feminism which her style has been described as. Because she had to be more “masculine”, more decisive, more focused, more deliberative, more purposeful than the men in the room to be heard. To compensate for the fact that in those days, there were no other women around.

Another obituary cartoon indicates that her legacy is not merely communism, but collectivism, much more broadly. A big part of her appeal. She thought her greatest achievement was the Labour Party of Tony Blair, that she had remade her opposition. And this is what, of course, great leaders and great governments do. They change the scene.

In Britain there were three landmark governments in the last century. The Liberal government of 1906 introduced the basis of welfare reform and old age pensions and transformed the Constitution. The 1945 Labour government brought in the welfare state and established the post-war settlement. And the 1979 Thatcher government, reversed much of that. MT’s concern was to “roll back the frontiers of the state”, to use the phrase she used in her seminal 1988 Bruges speech. This almost gave birth to Euroscepticism, which mutated into leave the EU, and to Brexit, as we now know.

A front page of the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio and the fact that it leads a Chilean newspaper is significant. One could go into Thatcher and Chile in great detail. But the headline is “Death of the Iron Lady, the woman who transformed Britain and impacted on the world”. Remin Ribao wrote of “the Thatcherist revolution”. This is before her death, by the way, but long after she was in office. Die Welt in Germany opined that “the Iron Lady leaves a legacy that is even now felt well beyond Britain’s borders”. The Financial Post in Canada offered “Thatcher’s legacy lives far and wide”. Shargh in Iran, “The majority of the countries of the world have put the Thatcherism movement on their agendas”. And Business Day in South Africa, reported on “the global representation of Thatcherism”.

Now there are other isms. There’s Maoism and Leninism for starters. But these are totalitarianisms which come from a person who can define their polity and their political culture, because they’re not contested in the normal way that we do in democracies. In terms of actual democracies, there aren’t any equivalents that I know of. There’s Reaganomics, as a variant, but it’s much less coherent than Thatcherism as a set of values. And Reagan was a much less effective communicator than was Thatcher. For that reason, I think this is an unusual phenomenon, and it crosses borders, not merely international borders, but also cultural and political borders.

Thatcher made a famous visit to Moscow in March 1987. It was a pre-election event. Styled as the Iron Lady by Pravda in 1976, this was intended to be a satirical remark. A woman cannot be an iron lady. But she eventually became the Iron Lady, and she became the person who cleared the world of hammers and sickles, as you’ve seen.

This visit was remarkable, because there was evidence of global charisma, one could say. She had become the most vociferous Cold War warrior, apart from Ronald Reagan at the time, absolutely unsparing in her criticism of the Soviet Union, and of Moscow and of communism, of collectivism. Yet she is mobbed in Moscow. She wore her Catherine the Great coat and waved to all and sundry. It was an enormous hit. She was asked there by an interviewer, “Prime minister, perhaps you will succeed a little in exporting Thatcherism to the USSR?” She replied, “Well, it is universally true, you know.”

By 1987, Thatcherism was at its the high point. The third term would be marked by hubris and overreach. The 1987 moment is really important because we have Gorbachev in the Kremlin, we have change in the Soviet Union. Thatcher acted as every British prime minister since Churchill had sought to do, as an intermediary or bridge between the United States and Europe and Russia in this instance. Thatcher’s meeting with Gorbachev in 1985 was enormously important, because she could convince the Americans, in a kind of Nixon in China way, that only someone like Thatcher could, that this guy was worth listening to, and that change may be coming.

As an aside, it is worth pointing out, also as a pre-election event, the Labour leader of the time, Neil Kinnock, went to the White House to visit Ronald Reagan and was humiliated in a concerted effort by Reagan to play down the importance of the socialists. Reagan wanted Thatcher re-elected. That was a scarring moment for Neil Kinnock. Thatcher was enormously influential.

A few years later, TASS, the Moscow news agency reported:

A New Conservative Party, Thatcherists of Russia, was created with a founding congress involving some 400 people, which passed the new party’s manifesto, proclaiming the party’s basis as the “economic and political philosophical doctrine known as Thatcherism”, which once brought Britain out of a most grave crisis.

The narrative of Thatcher saving the country is very common among her supporters domestically, but also with commentators overseas. This is the dominant narrative. She saved that country, and she can therefore save this country. TASS added, “No better than the one Russia is living through. The new party is expected to have two headquarters in St Petersburg and in London, with branches in 20 Russian cities.” It didn’t come to pass, but the ambition was there in that febrile period after the fall of communism and before Putin restored autocracy to Russia.

Another obiturial cartoon from the United States about the role of the Iron Lady has her smashing the Iron Curtain. And she was very proud of this. I’ve seen evidence for this far and wide.

In a Czech newspaper she was said to be the, “icon of the economic transformation of Czechoslovakia”. She had “pointed out the path from a rotting society to a dynamic one grounded in the markets and individual freedoms, recalling the euphoria of the revolutionary years of the 1990s, a highly idealised view predominates”. This is very true. It is a very idealised view.

In the Czech Republic, there were two Václav’s. Václav Klaus and Václav Havel. Klaus was a conservative who became prime minister, a very right-wing conservative. He loved Thatcher. Václav Havel, of the left, was one of the leading campaigners against communism. He also became president afterwards. He, equally, loved Thatcher. So, both left and right proclaimed her and lauded her publicly. The Conservatives because she offered conservative solutions to the problems of society, essentially market-based solutions. The socialists, because she was fighting against communism and the freedom of people in the east to have democracies and not to be oppressed.

The solidarity with these groups was very significant. Ten years ago, I attended a conference in Prague on Margaret Thatcher and Eastern Europe. The influence of Thatcher and Thatcherism on Central and East European states. I thought the conference would be perfect for my project. It was an experience meeting all of these Czech people for whom she was an icon – and was still an icon a year after her death.

A cartoon in the Ottawa Citizen captured her influence as the statues of Lenin and other communist leaders were toppled. The statue of Lenin has collapsed behind her. And she’s saying, “Think it was easy to help do it. Try doing it whilst wearing a skirt and high heels.” Holding a cup of tea as well. And there’s, of course, her handbag blooded with Lenin matter. Here she is again challenged by the notion of being a woman in a man’s world.

Feminists in Britain, because they tend to be of the left, are very hostile towards Thatcher. And Thatcher herself said that she was not a feminist. What did it ever do for me? Which is, I would suggest, is a rather ahistorical view of the role of feminism in Western democracies. But, nevertheless, she got there by her own achievements. Although, of course, it has to be pointed out that her career was made possible by marrying a wealthy man. So, there’s a very old-fashioned notion to her, as well as her being a trailblazer and a pioneer for women’s rights.

Klein Zeitung in Vienna was very struck by this as the front page. I can’t think of another foreign leader who would occupy the entire front page of a British newspaper, even an American President, as I saw repeatedly in 2013 after she died. And the translation for you is, “The backbone is underdeveloped in some politicians, perhaps because it is so little used”. She wasn’t known for her wit. But there’s a certain wisdom and irony in some of these comments. Again, this is about the mode and manner of leadership, about not standing in the middle of the road and being hit by traffic in both directions, about having a clear purpose and a clear conviction. This appealed to voters very strongly, and it does compare very unfavourably with leaders today, I would suggest. Where one has absolutely no sense at all about the current Prime Minister’s political persona, purpose or direction.

In Kiev, in much happier days, Tulia Tymoshenko, perhaps was over keen to associate herself with Margaret Thatcher. But what comes across very much in my research is how women are keen to be associated, or keen not to be associated with MT. It’s either I am like her or she’s the last thing I’m like.

There’s a lovely Thatcher quotation: “if you want something talked about, ask a man. Want something done, ask a woman”. This sense of decisiveness is a big part of her appeal. Her appeal is international and very strongly felt in the United States. One could say she was possibly the biggest export since the Beatles. You encounter Churchill regularly. You encounter Thatcher regularly. You encounter James Bond and Paddington Bear regularly. But very few other British figures resonate in the United States. There, she’s seen as an American icon and she would be very proud of that.

She did indeed embody American values, as you would see them, entrepreneurialism, enterprise, a small state, personal responsibility. The term freedom is much more used in the US than the UK as a term of political dialogue. But she believed in it very strongly. And the philosophical basis of her approach, is very significant.

There are so many caricatures of Thatcher and of Thatcherism, so much abuse of Thatcher long predating the bear pit of social media, that one feels obliged to point out that she saw an ethical underpinning of Thatcherism, an ethical basis to personal liberty, rather than being presented as amoral. She had a very strong sense of the ethics. I’m pointing this out merely as a scholar, pointing out this was said rather than necessarily approving of it or not. But it’s often overlooked, often neglected. The Americans recognised her from the outset.

Time Magazine featured MT cast in bronze when she was first elected. Britain’s fighting lady, even before coming to office. They could see it. She met Reagan in 1975 when he was the prospective candidate for the Republican nomination in 1976 and they clicked. They had a similar diagnosis of their country’s ills and a similar prescription as to what needed to be done about it. So, the Americans were viewing her very much as the possibility of what might happen in the United States – something not dissimilar happened with Trump and Brexit in 2016 which is another lecture entirely.

In 2015, in the Republican primaries which Trump was part of, in one of the big debates, candidates were asked who should be the first woman on an American bank note. Jeb Bush, then the front runner, and George H. W. Bush’s son and George W Bush’s older brother said, “Oh, Margaret Thatcher.” So, the leading candidate in an American election, instantly thought of MT as the most likely female who should be on an American dollar bill. An anecdotal remark, but nevertheless, I think one of some significance.

Hormones can be affected by this leader. I’ve noticed that in many of her parliamentary colleagues. Today, we have something like 40 per cent of MPs who are female. That’s a very recent development. The New Republic is an American Republican conservative magazine. The slide from that magazine shows how they loved the idea of what she represented. They loved that she was much more articulate than Reagan and became more so as Reagan started declining in a second administration.

A clearer embodiment of American values is that the Washington Heritage Foundation has its Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom. There are Thatcher books about leadership in the United States. I’ve done versions of this talk many times in the US. It’s clear how much American voters, certainly those of a certain generation, admired and respected her. Even Democrats. Her clarity of vision and the views she had, which were once controversial in large part, have become something of a consensus between parties thereafter.

Of all places, I’ll go to France next. In the 2017 election campaign, Thatcher was a figure in the French election campaign four years after dying, in a country she had little regard for or affection for. Nicolas Sarkozy, the Conservative candidate recently released from prison, said, “Where is the truth when one pretends to be Thatcher in London and Mitterrand in Paris.” He was speaking of his opponent, Francois Hollande, who was using different identities to promote himself.

My point here is that for Thatcher to have a greater impact than Reagan as an international figure, and Thatcherism rather than Reaganomics, points to the greater intensity and clarity of the program and of the proponent. By contrast, Hollande replied, “Thatcher is his model, not mine.” It was playground language between these candidates in a presidential campaign, using a dead foreign statesperson had become part of French politics.

In one of the UK elections, the leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague, found himself in advertisements with Thatcher’s hair on. That was sufficient to define her. I think I could draw Bob Menzies now, a very large guy with very dark eyebrows. One could do the same with Trump, for example, and one could also do it with Thatcher. In Liberation on its cover, Francois Fillon was pictured with Margaret Thatcher’s hair. Fillon loved it. He loved the association. He responded, “She is the symbol of an inflexible political determination to stop a situation of decline. Some candidates wanted to be united, unkind to me by calling me Thatcherite, but it pleased me.” He didn’t succeed in the nomination, but that image nevertheless became part of his campaign. And, in the view of the conservative British newspaper, The Economist, that was what France needed – a dose of neoliberalism. Arguably, Emmanuel Macron would agree with this most wholeheartedly. He doesn’t cite Thatcher himself, but the crisis he’s in is in large part because of the size of the French state and the underperforming generative capacity of the French economy.

Thatcher was a huge supporter of Israel. Shimon Peres, the Labour leader said, “We have to fight poverty, not the impoverished. We have to fight unemployment, not the unemployed. The financial debate is an ideological debate between social welfare and Thatcherism.” Here he was using the T-word as a term of criticism of his opponent. Of course, the current Israeli president, Benjamin Netanyahu, loved her. He adored her, saying, “We’ve instituted the most sweeping set of economic reforms. We are Thatcherizing Israel”. So, she was an icon for the right in Israel, a bogey for the left.

She was very big in Korea. In Korea Times it was reported, “South Korea has been gripped by an ever-intensifying ideological dispute. The chief policy-director of the Liberty Union, which is spearheading the movement, said ‘The gist of the new right campaign is to pursue social reform on the basis of liberal democracy, market economy and internationalism, without being inclined to the far left or far right. The theoretical basis for the new right movement is British Thatcherism.’” So, they saw it as not being left wing or right-wing, but merely sensible. Thatcherism had become the norm. This is in 2005. And the same newspaper in 2008.

Three years later, in the Korea Times it reported, “Thatcher held a strong conviction that liberalism is more efficient and moral. With a strong will, Thatcher cured the British disease and changed the paradigm of a welfare state to a free market economy. The government needs to realise that ‘capitalism is a system of justice’ and preach this perception to the general public. The era of ideological debates has ended but the ideology itself is not gone forever. Like Thatcher, Lee Myung-bak would be able to get a credit with his name attached by an ‘-ism’ only if he changes the paradigm of ideology.”

Thatcher changed the paradigm of ideology as seen in Seoul, in South Korea and in Spain. ABC, the Spanish newspaper, reported, “The years of that right government were an extraordinarily fruitful period for Western society, she [Thatcher] restored confidence in the virtues of the free market and of individual autonomy. Blair Labour desperately tried to build an ideological foundation, but the experiment of the so called ‘Third Way’ got nowhere. The legacy of Thatcher is precisely that only great principles can prevail in the long term.”

Proof of Spain’s devotion can be seen in one of my holiday snaps. I am at Plaza Margaret Thatcher in Madrid. There’s actually a Margaret Thatcher Square in Madrid, in the financial district. So, she was revered in Spain, but to a large extent reviled in Britain.

A statue of Thatcher was unveiled in a London gallery in 2003. Within a week, it had been decapitated. So, any monuments to Thatcher are on plinths so high you can barely see who it is, because of the threat of vandalism. She’s like Marmite, very hostile to some people and they are hostile towards her. Indeed, when she died, there were death parties around Britain. Americans were often shocked by this, although they weren’t very common. One was in Newcastle. One in Brixton in South London. And “Ding Dong, the witch is dead” made number one in the charts as people bought the single to celebrate her passing.

She was divisive. This is an important cartoon the details of which are far too small so I’ll read some of it out. It was from Syndicated in Africa, and it has an African person about to set fire to Thatcher on a funeral pyre made up of posters reading slogans like “Rust in Peace”, “Support for dictators, Pinochet, Mobutu, etc”, “Support for apartheid in South Africa”, “government spending on social services”, “Neocolonialism” and bones and skulls. Margaret Thatcher was widely hated as an example, as they would see it, of Neocolonialism, and as someone who supported American capitalism and imperialism around the world.

A cartoon from the United States had her reaching the pearly gates and sending God running for cover. She was asking, “What kind of socialist dystopia are you running here kind sir? Aren’t you familiar with the perils of a culture of dependency?” God had replied saying, “I think I’ve died and gone to hell.” Even in death, the dynamism continued .

The Wall Street Journal opined, “Certainly French free-market politicians and intellectuals, for instance, subscribe in principle to much of what Mrs Thatcher said last September in her speech in Bruges, Belgium. But fearful of being branded as ‘nationalists’ and ‘anti-European’, they stay as far as possible from notions traceable to the British prime minister.” So just as those were holding her close, hugging her close, others were running a mile from association. But she was still there.

Dominic Moisi Project, Syndicate opined, “Confronted with the problem of bringing about positive changes in a domestic or international environment that seems to defy the power of ‘normal’ leaders, one looks for new Alexanders to untie the ‘Gordian knot’ and transcend complexity by sheer force of will and dynamism. For example, structural reforms in Europe are thought impossible to enact unless imposed by some reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher.”

Then there was the symbolism, the imagery. It’s very hard to have a woman in a Hermes scarf in a tank, looking plausible, but it did with Thatcher because it fitted the idea of her. In 1988, the Democrat candidate for the Republican presidency, Michael Dukakis did a similar thing and looked ridiculous, like Snoopy. Whereas Thatcher in a tank, seemed to fit because of her persona. And so, in Die Welt in Germany and Haaretz in Israel it was the same image the day after she died. This is how she was seen, how she was represented.

It went beyond that into popular culture all around the world. I can now say Iron Lady in 15 different languages, because of the movie on Thatcher with Meryl Streep became a global phenomenon. Meryl Streep won the Best Actress Oscar for portraying Margaret Thatcher.

I haven’t seen the movie because one can be too close to the material, and it’d be too upsetting to see things being mangled. But it is an example of the salience of her overall. And the surreal situation of Margaret Thatcher as if she was actually on the cover of Newsweek, but in fact it was Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher on the cover of Newsweek. This kind of bizarre world where things don’t really happen, but are actually happening.

So, some thoughts about Australia.  MT was not fond of Malcolm Fraser. She regarded him as being a wet conservative like Robert Muldoon and Brian Mulroney in Canada. There was no chemistry between her and Fraser at all. By contrast. MT and Bob Hawke got on like a house on fire, almost pugilistically. But that was part of the appeal.

One of the cliches about MT, the caricatures, is she was a dictatorial person. This was not true. She loved people standing up to her and contesting, and she loved Bob Hawke for doing that. She loved Mitterrand, who was a French socialist – the two worst things in the world in one person – yet she liked him. She liked Jacques Delors similarly, because he was tough and intelligent and fearless like Bob Hawke. They had a very fractious relationship, but fundamentally mutual respect prevailed. And the closest relationship she had, of course, was with John Howard. But, by then, she had left office. She also was very respectful of Paul Keating as treasurer, because she could see how Labor in this country had been changed, not unlike Labour in her own country.

I’ll end with my Budapest slide monument to her unveiled in Budapest a few years ago, where she’s very popular with the Orban regime and some of the Orban supporters.