The World

Soon afterwards in April 1981, Indira flew to London to discuss Afghanistan with another female leader.

‘People think it strange Mrs Gandhi and I got on so well personally,’ said Margaret Thatcher, British prime minister. Gandhi, pro-Soviet socialist, and Thatcher, anti-Communist conservative, were opposites, though they had much in common, both graduates of Somerville College, Oxford, both natural commanders in war and peace, women who had succeeded in male worlds. ‘I am in no sense a feminist,’ wrote Indira, ‘but I believe in women being able to do everything.’ Thatcher agreed: ‘The feminists hate me, don’t they?’ she said. ‘And I don’t blame them.’ When Thatcher said Indira ‘had this combination of things of being both very feminine but nevertheless capable of making very tough decisions’, she could have been talking about herself. And like Indira, it took a war to make her.

On 2 April 1982, Argentina, long ruled by military dictators who had killed or ‘disappeared’ thousands of leftists over recent decades, invaded and seized a distant British possession, the Falkland Islands. Within three days, Thatcher had mustered and dispatched a task force that sailed 8,000 miles to retake the islands. When an Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano

, sailed into what Thatcher had declared to be an exclusion zone, she ordered its sinking, a decision that removed the Argentine navy from the battle. On 21 May, British forces landed; on 14 June, the capital fell. The operation had been a risk. Before the war, her premiership had looked doomed. Instead she had pulled off every leader’s dream: a short, victorious war. Yet she was a born war leader. ‘You can’t retake islands I’m afraid without loss of life,’ she told a schoolboy interviewer (this author) in Downing Street soon afterwards. ‘We lost 255 lives in Falklands. The Russians shot down a Korean airliner and lost 269 lives in one act.’ The victory restored confidence in her vision of British exceptionalism: ‘I don’t believe you can be over-patriotic when you stand for a country that stands for honesty, integrity, freedom, justice.’

Thatcher, née Margaret Roberts, was a Grantham grocer’s daughter who graduated from Oxford as a chemist and became a barrister. Cleverer than most of her opponents, mastering her briefs and dominating her male colleagues and rivals, she was both a radical, favouring the brashness of self-made entrepreneurs, and socially conservative. Her operatically posh accent, her bouffant blonde hairstyle, her swinging handbag became props of her theatrical regality. She prided herself on her industry and energy, surviving on just four hours’ sleep a night. ‘I was born that way, I was trained that way,’ she told this author. ‘I’ve gone on acting that way … You must be born fairly fit and then you must train yourself to work extremely hard. I’d need to sleep a lot more than I do if I made a habit of more sleep.’ Long married to a whisky-snifting golf-playing retired company director, she, like Indira, shamelessly favoured a jackanapes son.

During the 1970s, Britain had joined the European Economic Community (later the European Union), but membership had not stopped a steep spiral of decline, as unemployment soared, overmighty trade unions bullied employers, who themselves were stuck in an obsolete culture, and Irish terrorists, the Provisional IRA, launched a murderous campaign, partly funded by Qaddafi. Elected in 1979, Thatcher confronted the unions, deregulated the stock market and promoted ‘self-reliance, initiative, hard work’, a new confidence in entrepreneurial energy and a patriotic view of Britain’s democratic and imperial past: ‘In this enormous empire we tried to take the best of our law and the best of our honesty to nations we administered. It wasn’t a bad record.’ But she never saw herself as Churchillian: ‘No one can see themselves as Churchill. That would be too arrogant and conceited for words … but he saw clearly, warned clearly, acted clearly, and I try to do the same.’ If Indira was her avatar as warrior-queen, Reagan was her geopolitical partner. Reagan and Thatcher performed on a political stage dominated by television, a media that would never have worked for earlier leaders: ‘I can’t remember Churchill ever doing a TV interview,’ mused Thatcher. She and Regan mastered the medium, henceforth essential for all leaders in all systems.^*