Margaret Thatcher: obituary - Telegraph For more than a decade Margaret Thatcher enjoyed almost unchallenged political mastery, winning three successive general elections. The policies she pursued with ferocious energy and unyielding will resulted in a transformation of Britain's economic performance. The resulting change was also political. But by discrediting socialism so thoroughly, she prompted in due course the adoption by the Labour Party of free market economics, and so, as she wryly confessed in later years, "helped to make it electable." As for the effects of the Thatcher phenomenon upon British society, these were both more ambiguous and more debatable. Her remark "there is no such thing as society" was wrenched altogether out of the context of the interview in which it was made, and made to seem to be an advocacy of naked individualism, when she was really calling for more personal responsibility. Yet, rightly or wrongly, the 1980s came to be seen as a time of social fragmentation whose consequences are still with us. Margaret Thatcher was the only British prime minister to leave behind a set of ideas about the role of the state which other leaders and nations strove to copy and apply. Monetarism, privatisation, deregulation, small government, lower taxes and free trade - all these features of the modern globalised economy were crucially promoted as a result of the policy prescriptions she employed to reverse Britain's economic decline. Above all, in America and in Eastern Europe she was regarded, alongside her friend Ronald Reagan, as one of the two great architects of the West's victory in the Cold War. Of modern British prime ministers, only Margaret Thatcher's girlhood hero, Winston Churchill, acquired a higher international reputation. Margaret Thatcher's obituary in full Early life Entering politics Life in the shadow cabinet The rise to leader From Opposition to Government War on the Left and in the Falklands The miners" strike and her second term Third term in office Ousted from Downing Street and the leadership Life after politics