Margaret Thatcher

Episode of Series “Famous lives”.
Champion of free minds and markets, Margaret Thatcher helped topple the welfare state and make the world safer for capitalism. In 1975 she challenged Edward Heath for the Tory leadership simply because the candidate of the party’s right wing abandoned the contest at the last minute. Thatcher stepped into the breach and set in motion a series of interconnected events that gave a revolutionary twist to the twentieth century’s last two decades and helped mankind end the millennium on a note of hope and confidence. The triumph of capitalism, the almost universal acceptance of the market as indispensable to prosperity, the collapse of Soviet imperialism, the downsizing of the state on nearly every continent and in almost every country in the world - Margaret Thatcher played a part in each of these transformations. Narrated by Lucy Longhurst.