If we had more feminists like Thatcher, we’d have vastly more women in Parliament and the US Senate, as well as more trees and fewer tedious television talk shows. More ‘‘feminists’’ like Thatcher, the first woman to lead a major Western democracy, and young women would be clamouring to be called one, too.

I moved to Belfast in 1987, when Thatcher was beginning her third term as British prime minister, and in retrospect I’m gratified to have experienced at least a portion of her premiership. In Northern Ireland, no name evoked more unqualified loathing than Maggie Thatcher’s, particularly among pro-IRA republicans. I instinctively admired anyone who could weather that intensity of antipathy. Women’s reputation for trying to please notwithstanding, Thatcher was never about being liked. Indeed, in a 2011 Reuters/Ipsos MORI Political Monitor poll about prime ministers of the last 30 years, Britons rated Tony Blair significantly higher in ‘‘likability’’ than Margaret Thatcher. But in the same poll, she topped the charts in ‘‘capability.’’ Thatcher herself must surely have treasured that poll.

She always courted less affection than respect, which even many of her detractors begrudgingly accorded her. She wasn’t nice. She was formidable. In Belfast, I rapidly grew to appreciate the ferocity with which Thatcher stood up to thugs in the IRA - and of course an organization that tries to kill you and successfully kills your friends and colleagues has hardly ingratiated itself. Her will was particularly tested during the 1981 hunger strikes, during which 10 republican prisoners starved to death in an effort to win privileges that, poignantly, would be accorded all Northern Irish prisoners in due course. Yet in principle, she would not capitulate to emotive, manipulative pressure tactics, even when the specter of hollowed cheeks and sallow skin made her appear heartless. Nevertheless, she helped to author the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, ultimately paving the way for Tony Blair’s Belfast Agreement of 1998, which to a large degree brought the gruesome ‘‘troubles’’ to a close.

My personal view is that in allowing the Republic of Ireland to have even a toehold say in the governance of the North was a fatal concession, but I am by nature even more inflexible and hidebound by principle than Thatcher, which is why I should never be elected to public office. Thatcher, by contrast, had a pragmatic side and was capable of compromise that she viewed to be in the larger interest of her country.Thatcher consistently defied gender stereotypes. A woman’s prerogative may be to change her mind, but Thatcher was decisive; her defense of British territorial interests when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982 was unequivocal, and helped to restore waning British self-regard.

The Iron Lady was anything but sentimental, as evidenced by her refusal to be moved by the miners’ strike of 1984-85 (the breaking of which the British left has never forgiven her for). Though women ostensibly seek harmony, she never shied from conflict, which is why a string of powerful ministers in her Cabinets were driven to resign. From her first assumption of the leadership of the Conservative Party, no one ever had the nerve to call her weak. As she confounded the expectation that a female political leader would err on the side of softness, accommodation and dithering, Thatcher also upended the traditional power structure of marriage. Modest and retiring, Denis Thatcher sat cheerfully in the backseat while his wife drove the car - and the country.