Pictures of young Margaret Thatcher that show how Iron Lady was cast

Margaret Hilda Roberts, a shopkeeper’s daughter from Grantham in Lincolnshire, had entered parliament in 1959, in the safe Conservative seat of Finchley, after an early career as a research chemist and a spell practicing law. By 1961 she was a junior minister in the pensions department. But with Harold Wilson running the country from 1964, the Sixties never really swung for her – and it was only when the Conservatives retook power in 1970 that her time in the spotlight arrived.

As Education Secretary, she was demonised as ‘Thatcher the milk snatcher’ when she took away the right to a free third-of-a-pint for schoolchildren. But the criticism was water off a duck’s back, and foreshadowed many skirmishes to come.

In 1975, with the Conservatives back in opposition, she defeated Edward Heath in the party leadership contest and set about constructing a political persona that would polarise opinion for the next decade and a half, and leave a legacy that remains controversial to this day.

The public Margaret Thatcher was not entirely her own creation. From the beginning she recognised the importance of image, as Mr Wilson had done, and hired public relations consultants Tim Bell and Gordon Reece to not only shape her election campaign but also her physical appearance.

They trained her to lower her voice, and re-dressed her – taking a cue from the glossy American soaps of the period – from suburban housewife to business executive. Once empowered, the new society she set in motion made the Maggie we can see here a political anachronism.

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