Tributes pour in for Margaret Thatcher
By Alan Cowell and John F. Burns, N.Y. Times
Margaret Thatcher, a dominant, divisive and yet revered figure in British politics whose impact on British life and society was enduring and contentious, died on Monday of a stroke, her family said. Politicians called her influence on her country’s destiny among the greatest since Winston Churchill, and the authorities said she would be buried with military honors.
“It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother, Baroness Thatcher, died peacefully following a stroke this morning,” a statement from her spokesman, Lord Tim Bell, said, referring to her son and daughter.
President Obama said in a tribute released by the White House that Mrs. Thatcher’s achievement as 
Britain’s first female prime minister taught “our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.” He added that the “world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend.”
Mrs. Thatcher, 87, was Britain’s first female prime minister, serving for 11 years beginning in 1979. She was known as the Iron Lady, a stern Conservative who transformed Britain’s way of thinking about its economic and political life, broke union power and opened the way to far greater private ownership.
The daughter of a grocer, she was leader of Britain through its 1982 war in the Falklands and stamped her skepticism about European integration onto her country’s political landscape for decades, famed for her succinct rejection of three European proposals for closer unity with the words: “No, no, no.”
Mrs. Thatcher had been in poor health for months, and close friends said she was suffering from a form of dementia with frequent difficulty remembering some of the key moments of her own career, including her close relationship with President Ronald Reagan. Within moments of the announcement by Lord Bell, Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister David Cameron offered tributes to what Mr. Cameron called “a great leader, a great prime minister, a great Briton.”
On Monday, Mr. Cameron cut short a visit to Spain and France — billed as the beginning of an effort to resolve his own troubled relationship with much of continental Europe — to return to Britain following Mrs. Thatcher’s death.
Mr. Cameron’s office said that, in line with her family’s wishes, Mrs. Thatcher would not be accorded a full state funeral. “We can announce that, with the Queen’s consent, Lady Thatcher will receive a ceremonial funeral with military honors,” a statement from 10 Downing Street said. “The service will be held at St Paul’s Cathedral. A wide and diverse range of people and groups with connections to Lady Thatcher will be invited. The service will be followed by a private cremation. All the arrangements being put in place are in line with wishes of Lady Thatcher’s family.”
Buckingham Palace said the Queen was “sad to hear the news” and would be sending a private message of sympathy to the family.
Lawmakers said Mrs. Thatcher had retired from public life about two years ago. Her career in active politics came to an end in 1990 when her own Conservative Party forced her from office and replaced her with John Major who said Monday that she had “brought conviction back to politics.”
An assessment in the conservative Daily Telegraph said: “She will go down in history not only as Britain’s first female prime minister, but as the woman who transformed Britain’s economy in addition to being a formidable rival on the international stage.”
“Lady Thatcher was the only British prime minister to leave behind a set of ideas about the role of the state which other leaders and nations strove to copy and apply,” the newspaper said.
Speaking to the BBC, Henry A. Kissinger, the former United States Secretary of State, said Mrs. Thatcher was a “great leader” and a “good friend of the United States.” She was known particularly for her close working alliance with President Reagan, with whom she shared a profound ideological rejection of cold war communism.
But she also won the respect of some interlocutors in Moscow, most notably Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who described her on Monday as “a politician whose word carried great weight.”
“Our first meeting in 1984 marked the beginning of a relationship that was at times difficult, not always smooth, but was treated seriously and responsibly by both sides,” Mr. Gorbachev, 82, said, according to Reuters. “We gradually developed personal relations that became increasingly friendly. In the end, we were able to achieve mutual understanding, and this contributed to a change in the atmosphere between our country and the West and to the end of the cold war.”
But the harsh ideological divisiveness of her legacy was evident in reactions to the news of her death.
Paul Kenny, a labor union leader, said Mrs. Thatcher would be “remembered by many for the destructive and divisive policies she reigned over.” And Lindsey German, a peace campaigner who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan long after Mrs. Thatcher’s formal political eclipse, said she “laid the basis for policies which wrecked the lives of millions in Britain” and “should also be remembered as a warmonger.”
“She led, alongside Ronald Reagan, the escalation of the cold war,” Ms. German said. “She introduced cruise missiles to Britain and fought the Falklands war.” The hostility resonated, too, with Gerry Adams, the leader of the nationalist Sinn Fein party that shares power with pro-British unionists in the Northern Irleand local authority.
“Her Irish policy failed miserably,” he said.
Well-wishers left flowers outside Mrs. Thatcher’s elegant London home, though British news reports said that for much of this year she had been living at the Ritz Hotel in central London as the guest of its owners.
The reports said she had moved to the hotel after a hospital stay that left her extremely frail and in need of constant care that required the space offered by a hotel suite compared to her townhouse home in London’s upmarket Belgravia district.
In assessing her impact, Richard Carr, a political scientist at Anglia Ruskin University, said: “To supporters, she changed Britain from a nation in long-term industrial decline to an energetic, dynamic economy. To opponents, she entrenched inequalities between the regions and classes, and placed the free market above all other concerns. Our politics, and many of our politicians, have been forged in her legacy.”
That view was borne out in remarks from opposition Labour figures, including the current party leader, Ed Miliband, and former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who acknowledged the long reach of her bequest to British politics.
“She will be remembered as a unique figure,” Mr. Miliband said. “She reshaped the politics of a whole generation. She was Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. She moved the center ground of British politics and was a huge figure on the world stage. The Labour Party disagreed with much of what she did and she will always remain a controversial figure. But we can disagree and also greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength.”
“She also defined the politics of the 1980s. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and I all grew up in a politics shaped by Lady Thatcher. We took different paths but with her as the crucial figure of that era.”
Mr. Blair said: “Some of the changes she made in Britain were, in certain respects at least, retained by the 1997 Labour Government, and came to be implemented by governments around the world.”
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