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Monetary Fund. 8 This was an almost unimaginable indignity, hinting that Britain was now in the category of nations to which UNICEF donates mosquito nets.
    Rubbish was piled high on the streets of Britain that winter, and so, at one point, were human corpses. 9 The Soviet trade minister told his British counterpart, “We don’t want to increase our trade with you. Your goods are unreliable, you’re always on strike, you never deliver.” 10
    This was what had become of the world’s greatest trading power.
    Sometime in this period—the date is unclear and varies according to the source, but the story is almost certainly true—a gray, timorous functionary delivered a paper on economic policy to a gathering of British Conservatives. Britain, he argued, must take a pragmatic middle path. In the middle of his speech, Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Opposition, interrupted. She stood up. She reached into her handbag, extracted a copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, held it up before the audience, then slammed it on the table. “ This, ” she said, “is what we believe!”

    Britain is now the richest country in Europe, and London once again the world’s financial capital. Thatcher is widely perceived to be the reason for this.
    I use the word “perceived” for a reason. I do not propose that anyone accept at face value the claim that Thatcher single-handedly reversed Britain’s trajectory. The story of Britain’s economic and geopolitical decline is exceptionally complex; it is not sure that it has been permanently reversed; and even if it has been, it would be, as Chou En-lai said of the French Revolution, too soon to tell. My own view is that the claim is at least partially true, and this is enough to ensure Thatcher’s place in history. But I do not need to prove this beyond all doubt. The widespread perception that it is true is also a critical element of this story. Given the grip Thatcher retains over the world’s collective political imagination, this legend matters because contemporary leaders—including yours—hope to emulate her example and appropriate her prestige.
    This point is connected to my first. Without saying so explicitly, Thatcher conveyed through her words and actions a thesis: Britain’s decline was not an inevitable fate, but a punishment . It was not, as many believed, a punishment for the sin of imperialism. It was a punishment for the sin of socialism. Thatcher proposed that in 1945 the good and gifted men and women of Britain had chosen a wicked path. They had ceased to be great because they had ceased to be virtuous. In ridding Britain of socialism, she intimated, she would restore it to virtue. She would make it once again worthy of greatness.
    To a Western world preoccupied with guilt, decline and decay, Thatcher’s message has a particularly significant resonance. It is hardly a secret that many of us are still wondering whether capitalism is the right path. It is the only right path, says Thatcher, and the only one men and women of virtue—not greed, but virtue —should take.
    Third, she matters because she is a woman. She achieved things that no woman before her had achieved, and she did so in a remarkable fashion, simultaneously exploiting every politically useful
aspect of her femininity and turning every conventional expectation of women upside down. In doing so, she refuted several millennia’s worth of assumptions about women, power, and women in power. She is for this reason not only an important figure, but an immensely interesting one, so much so that she has passed into mythological status even before her death. And this point is related to the two before: The myth she created of herself is what enabled her so completely to capture the world’s imagination and present her case to such transformative effect.
    No other living politician can claim these achievements, and none enjoys