Liz Truss will be the third woman – and the third woman from the Conservative Party – to take over as prime minister in UK history.
Not long ago, between 2016 and 2019, there was Theresa May, who sadly ended her time in the lead amid squabbles over the paths to Brexit. Already in the last century, the “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher held a government between 1979 and 1990, spanning all the 1980s.
May’s government has been practically engulfed by discussions of Britain’s exit from the European Union. She took over three weeks after the referendum that asked the British if they would like to leave the bloc; after an extremely disputed campaign, yes reached 51.89% of the votes, against 48.11% who preferred to stay.
That was the reason why David Cameron resigned — he had endorsed the losing side. In 2019, after much negotiation, May put her exit plan to a vote in Parliament. In the first performance, she lost by 230 votes (432 against and 202 in favour), considered the biggest defeat imposed on a ruler in the history of the United Kingdom.
On March 12, she resubmitted the agreement and lost again, this time by 149 votes (391 against and 242 in favor). Two weeks later, she tried and suffered another defeat, now tighter, by 58 votes (344 to 286).
May had said days before the latest attempt that she was “probably not going to lead the UK in the next steps of the Brexit negotiations”. After the third denial, however, she did not resign. Labor leader at the time, Jeremy Corbyn, said that if she had no alternatives to the deal she should “leave not at an unspecified date in the future, but now.”
The resignation, however, only came about three months later, in June 2019.
Going back in time, we come to Margaret Thatcher (1925-2003), who was not only the first woman to hold the position, but also the longest-running person in the UK in the last century.
The “iron lady,” as one journalist dubbed her, graduated in chemistry, but soon turned to law and politics. Elected, she introduced economic policies to try to reverse high inflation, which reached 13% a year, and what became known as the “winter of discontent”, with major strikes bringing the UK to a halt.
Thatcher eased rules for investors in the financial sector, privatized state-owned companies and reduced the power of unions. She reversed her decline in popularity as the economy recovered and by winning dictatorial Argentina in the war over the Falkland Islands (Malvinas, to Buenos Aires) in 1982.
In 1984, she survived a time bomb installed five floors above her suite at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. The artifact had been placed by a member of the IRA, a terrorist organization fighting British influence in Ireland. The suite’s bathroom was destroyed, but Thatcher was in another room.
Re-elected twice, she lost support as she looked skeptically at the future European Union talks, which would eventually materialize in 1992. Like Theresa May and recently Boris Johnson, she resigned.
