Return of the Iron Lady? How Theresa May compares with Margaret Thatcher

As subsequent events demonstrated, it was a mantra which she seemed to apply to herself more than the small army of female politicians who were hoping, indeed expecting, preferment under her leadership.

In fact, very few women prospered politically during her premiership. Early on she appointed her friend Lady (Janet) Young as Leader of the House of Lords, a Cabinet post, but scarcely a key and influential one.

Other than that, you can search in vain through her Cabinets to find other females.

Mrs Thatcher could deal with male politicians, but she was seemingly all at sea with female ones.

She used to enjoy, even relish, stand-up rows with male Cabinet ministers, wielding both her natural authority and also exploiting feminine wiles to get her way.

But this was not something she was either able or willing to do with females. She once said she owed nothing to women’s lib and that she had climbed up the political ladder unaided.

And she also once made clear that she did not like strident women - was she in fact afraid of them?

Several prominent examples come to mind, notably Edwina Currie and Sally Oppenheim, both of whom came close to Cabinet rank, but never actually got there.

In fact, it was almost a handicap being a female Tory politician in the Thatcher era. If they had hoped for promotion, they never got it.

All of which was odd, because Mrs Thatcher was herself feminine in many respects. She was not afraid to shed a tear in public, as when her son Mark went missing for a time in a desert motor rally in Algeria, or when she left 10 Downing Street for the last time.

And she was very fond of children. I once saw her in Beijing ticking off a Chinese general, telling him that she would leave the scene unless he arranged for proper warm clothes to be put on scores of shivering, flimsily-clad children who had turned out to honour her on a bitterly cold morning.

Equally, when she was once guest of honour at a parliamentary press gallery Christmas party, she was cajoling the children to eat up their sausages and beans.

When, the following year, a political journalist asked his small daughter if she would like to go to the party again that year, the child replied: “Will that nice dinner lady be there again?”

Her relations with the one-time formidable Norwegian prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, were to say the least of it uncordial.

Ms Brundtland never had fewer than eight women in her Cabinets. She was Labour and appeared to despise Mrs Thatcher.

Ms Brundtland used to land-ski 25 miles from her home to her office in Oslo, 25 miles away. Once, when she was asked if she had learned anything from Mrs Thatcher, she simply replied: “No.”

“When I asked her how she planned to increase women’s participation in her government, she clearly showed little interest in the issue and merely pointed out that there were few qualified women in the British parliament to choose from,” Ms Brundtland said.

“The fact that she was also leader of the Conservatives and that she could take the initiative for increased equality on many levels obviously hadn’t hit her,” she added.

And although she often praised the then Indian leader Indira Gandhi, Mrs Thatcher’s personal relationship with her appeared awkward.

I once saw the pair of them emerge from a summit in Delhi with sparks flying out of their heads. It seemed to epitomise, as did the subsequent press conference, that powerful women cannot abide each other’s company.