Word: thatcher
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...Thatcher has broadened the appeal of her party primarily by being herself. True, some of her policies are also good politics: to capitalize on the universal dream of owning one's own home, she gave residents of government-built houses the opportunity to purchase them. About 500,000 have done so. But much of the Thatcher program is rooted in her right-wing instincts. She stirs the hearts Of many with her call for a return to capital punishment and greater powers for the police. Thatcher has become, according to Tory M.P. Julian Critchley, the spokeswoman for a new middle...
...grandees but with insurance agents, housewives, teachers, salesmen. These party activists tend to pick candidates from among their own kind. The new Tory politician tends to be a self-made, middle-manager type with more stomach for the rough-and-tumble of pavement politics than his or her predecessors. Thatcher, too, has apparently found the old school ties a bit too binding: her Cabinet no longer contains a Tory blueblood. The last to go was Lord Carrington, who resigned as Foreign Secretary after shouldering the blame for the Falklands takeover...
That preference for the arriviste should not be surprising, for Margaret Thatcher is an exemplar of the new Tory. From her earliest days in Grantham, where she and her family lived above her father's grocery store, she seems to have been infused with a Girl Scout Handbook of virtues. "I'm a born hard worker," she told a reporter. "I watched my mother work like a Trojan in the shop and house." She sometimes repeats one of her grandmother's favorite homilies: "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well...
...Downing Street, where Thatcher once again lives above the shop, the homily is alive and well. After retiring around 1 a.m., she rises in time to catch the 6 a.m. newscast on BBC Radio 4. Often with no more than an apple for breakfast, she enthusiastically bustles about preparing eggs, bacon, toast and marmalade...
...office, paging through a report of overnight news prepared by her press secretary, Bernard Ingham. She looks through the Financial Times, but generally only skims the other papers. In fact, Thatcher makes it a rule to skip nasty stories about herself. "You start to see your name and, if you know it's going to be horrid, then stop," she once said. "During the day, you have to take your decisions and concentrate your mind, and you can't if something is really hurtful...