Monitor | Iron Lady quickly ditched her principles if politics demanded
Margaret Thatcher was not afraid of executing policy U-turns when it came to economic doctrine and avoiding some damaging headlines
The thousands of articles published in the past couple of days about Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister who died on Monday, fall into two camps.
There are the adoring hagiographies of the right which venerate her for revitalising Britain's moribund economy.
And then there are the condemnatory philippics of the left, which denounce her for the high social cost of her economic agenda and accuse her of breaking up long-established communities.
Few on either side, however, seem to doubt either the effectiveness of her economic policies, or her steadfast adherence to her political principles, typified by her famous declaration "the lady's not for turning".
That's curious because for the first two years of her government, from May 1979 to April 1981, most people in Britain and many members of Thatcher's own Conservative Party, agreed that her monetarist economic policies were an unmitigated disaster.
It was only a stunning U-turn two years into her first term that saved her premiership from the sort of internal party putsch that eventually deposed her in 1990.