Margaret Thatcher was a reformer who changed her country for the better

The news of the death of Margaret Thatcher is not, at her age and in the condition that she has been in for some years, a great surprise or entirely sad. But in contemplation of the great career she had and the immense service she rendered the United Kingdom and the Western world, it is overwhelmingly sad. In general, Britain's greatest prime ministers have served successfully in wars with other Great Powers: Both William Pitts (in the Seven Years' and Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the first two real world wars), Lord Palmerston in the Crimean War, and David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in the Great War and the Second World War. Robert Walpole, Robert Peel, John Russell, Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone and the Marquess of Salisbury are also generally reckoned to be great prime ministers, either as stylish survivors like Walpole and Salisbury or great reformers, and especially if their accomplishments were leavened with a tremendous wit, parliamentary legend and a literary cachet, as Disraeli's and Churchill's were.

© 2024 Conrad Black