Thatcher bounces back

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 general election triumph, Simon Heffer says the Iron Lady has a new spring in her step

In her 79th year, widowed after a long and happy marriage, and having endured indifferent health, Lady Thatcher might seem to some to have become vulnerable, damaged and a target for pity. Certainly, a spiteful profile of her in a Sunday newspaper a few weeks ago gave the impression that the Iron Lady was now like a cross between Miss Havisham and Lady Circumference, a mixture of the tragic and the absurd. Yet on the 25th anniversary of her triumph in the 1979 general election, Britain’s first woman prime minister — and the only one still to win three successive contests — is not in the mentally and physically reduced circumstances that her enemies would like to imagine.

She is inevitably older and, after a succession of minor strokes, inevitably frailer.