King of Kings - by Lewis Lavoie
Panel #98
 Margaret Thatcher
Country
 Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
In Office
 May 1979 – 28 November 1990
Born
 13 October 1925
Died
Wikipedia: Margaret Thatcher entered 10 Downing Street with a mandate to reverse the UK's economic decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised reduced state intervention, free markets, entrepreneurialism and the selling off of state owned companies. She gained much support after the 1982 Falklands War and was re-elected the following year. Thatcher took a hard line against trade unions, survived an assassination attempt, and opposed the Soviet Union (her tough-talking rhetoric gained her the nickname the "Iron Lady"); she was re-elected for an unprecedented third term in 1987. The following years would prove difficult, as her Community Charge plan was largely unpopular, and her views regarding the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister in November 1990 after Michael Heseltine's challenge to her leadership of the Conservative Party.
Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister was the longest since that of Lord Salisbury and the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century. She was the first woman to lead a major political party in the UK, and the first of only three women to hold any of the four great offices of state. She holds a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, which entitles her to sit in the House of Lords.
To her supporters, Margaret Thatcher remains a revolutionary figure who revitalised Britain's economy, impacted the trade unions, and re-established the nation as a world power. She contributed greatly to the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism. But Thatcher was also a controversial figure, in that her premiership was also marked by high unemployment and social unrest. Many critics fault her economic policies for the unemployment level. Speaking in Scotland in April 2009, before the 30th anniversary of her election as prime minister, Thatcher declared: 'I regret nothing,' and insisted 'she was right to introduce the poll tax and to close loss-making industries to end the country's "dependency culture".