When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. To Britons of my generation, she wasn’t merely a famous Conservative politician, a champion of the free market, and a vocal supporter of Ronald Reagan: she was part of our mental furniture, and always will be. The day after her electoral triumph, Mr. Hill, my fifth form English teacher, an avuncular fellow with longish hair and a mustache, who had never previously expressed any political opinions, came into the classroom and shouted, “Right, you lot. Shut up and get down to work. It’s a new regime.” My father, a lifelong Labour Party voter, was equally aghast, especially when he discovered that my mother had voted for Mrs. T., on the grounds that “it’s about time we had a woman in charge.”

The Iron Lady, a sobriquet that some Soviet journalists would subsequently bestow upon her, was already inside 10 Downing Street, laying down the law. On her way in, famously, she stopped and quoted St. Francis of Assisi about bringing harmony where there was doubt—a statement that I and many others came to see as the first of her many outrages. How could such a divisive, bellicose, and heartless figure have the gall to talk like that? But this morning, watching for the first time in many years some footage of what she said, I realized that she wasn’t actually trying to portray herself as a conciliator. Mrs. Thatcher—and despite the life peerage that gave her the title of baroness, no one in Britain would call her anything else—was sending a sterner message about what lay ahead. Flanked by two burly policemen, her blonde hair swept back and lacquered into immobility, she also recited several more of St. Francis’s lines: “Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” Then, quoting the late Airey Neave, her aristocratic mentor in the Conservative Party, whom the I.N.L.A, an offshoot of the I.R.A., had blown up just weeks earlier, she added in a voice that, even today, thirty-four years later, can set my teeth grating: “There is now work to be done.”

Indeed there was. Even her harshest critics would concede as much. By the late nineteen-seventies, the social compact that had held Britain together since the Second World War appeared to be coming apart at the seams. During the previous decade, under governments of both major parties, there had been a seemingly endless series of labor strikes, which had brought the country to a standstill. To a schoolboy like me, they were sometimes fun. When the bus drivers went on strike, you didn’t have to go to school. When the lights went out, because of a stoppage by power workers, you couldn’t do your homework. But in the winter of 1978-79, when the local government unions walked out, leaving the garbage piling up in the streets and the dead laying, unburied, in the morgues, many Brits decided that enough was enough. Prominent among them was the grocer’s daughter from Grantham, a nondescript market town in Lincolnshire.

In subsequent years, her name would come to be associated with laissez-faire economists like Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. But Mrs. Thatcher’s guiding philosophy was really more homespun. It emanated from the shop she lived above with her mother and father, Alderman Albert Roberts, who believed in hard work, thrift, and balancing the books. “Some say I preach merely the homilies of housekeeping or the parables of the parlour,” Mrs. Thatcher said, in a 1982 speech to a banquet of grandees in the City of London. “But I do not repent. Those parables would have saved many a financier from failure and many a country from crisis.”

Beset by a big budget deficit and a falling pound, the previous Labour government had been forced to go cap-in-hand to the International Monetary Fund for an emergency loan. Mrs. Thatcher, an English patriot of the school of Elgar and Churchill, considered that a national humiliation. As part of a commitment to bring down inflation and balance the budget, her government cut spending sharply, and when the inevitable recession ensued, Mrs. Thatcher resisted calls for a change in strategy, telling the Conservative party conference in 1981, “The lady’s not for turning.”

By that stage, I was at university (where, funnily enough, my fellow blogger and transplant Andrew Sullivan was one of Mrs. T.’s most vocal supporters). My tutor in macroeconomics, David Soskice, a brilliant man whose father had served as a Labour Home Secretary during the nineteen-sixties, thought the government’s economic strategy made no sense. (His colleague, the eminent economic historian Nicholas Crafts, while equally dismissive of some of the things Mrs. Thatcher was doing, was also of the view that a strike-prone and inefficient industrial sector needed shock therapy.) I heartily agreed with Soskice. Every few months, I’d go down to London to protest. Walking around Hyde Park and bellowing “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie—Out! Out! Out!” was good for the spirit, but it didn’t make the blindest bit of difference, especially after General Galtieri made the terrible blunder of sending some Argentine troops to occupy the Falkland Islands, which were known in Argentina as Las Malvinas.

Seemingly the only two people who doubted that Mrs. Thatcher would send a military force to retake the tiny islands in the South Atlantic, whose two-thousand-odd residents were mostly of British descent, were the Argentine dictator and the U.S. Secretary of State, Alexander Haig. In April, 1982, Haig flew to London to try and broach a diplomatic solution, only to be dispatched back to Washington with a hornet rather than a flea in his ear. “High color is in her cheeks, a note of rising indignation in her voice, she leans across the polished table and flatly rejects what she calls the ‘woolliness’ of our secondstage formulation,” the U.S. diplomat Jim Rentschler noted in his diary after the fateful meeting between Haig and Thatcher.

Like most of Mrs. Thatcher’s critics (and, presumably, like Haig), I viewed the subsequent war, which saw more than nine hundred people killed—more than two-thirds of them were Argentines—as a pointless exercise in post-colonial posturing. Mrs. Thatcher, egged on by the Murdoch/Rothermere/Harmsworth tabloids, revelled in playing the role of Lord Palmerston and teaching Johnny Foreigner a lesson. “[W]hat was the alternative?” she wrote in her memoirs. “That a common or garden dictator should rule over the queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and violence? Not while I was prime minister.”

If the British expeditionary force had been defeated, she would have been finished. But the Argentine conscripts were no match for the professional British soldiers, and Mrs. Thatcher was triumphant. Emerging from 10 Downing Street on a dark April evening, she stood beside John Nott, her Defense Minister, as he announced the Argentine surrender on South Georgia, a neighboring island to the Falklands, following a British naval bombardment. Refusing to take any questions from the assembled hacks, she instead instructed them: “Just rejoice at that news, and congratulate our forces and the marines. Good night, gentlemen.”

To me and to many others at the time, that sounded like rejoicing at the opening engagement of a war that, within weeks, would claim the lives of nearly a thousand people. But watching the footage again this morning, I have to admit, I couldn’t help cracking a smile at her temerity, her hectoring, and her sheer certitude that she was in the right. She really was something else. No wonder women like my mother (who never voted for her after 1979) admired her strength of character. You think Hillary Clinton is tough?