TIME最佳封面1979--撒切尔夫人（1，2，3/9)

Cover Story Excerpt:
Savor the moment. For the first time in history, two women were the principals in the traditional "kissing hands upon appointment" — a ceremony in which the leader of the winning party is summoned to Buckingham Palace, there to be designated Prime Minister of Britain by the monarch and asked to form a government. The monarch, of course, was Queen Elizabeth II. The Prime Minister was Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 53, a grocer's daughter from the English Midlands, who last week led her Conservative Party to a decisive victory over James Callaghan's Labor Party. The Tories won a solid majority of 43 seats in the 635-member House of Commons, and Thatcher thereby became not only the first woman to head a British government but the first to lead a major Western nation...Read the full story

Even before the vote tally established that the Conservatives had an absolute majority of 318 seats, outgoing Prime Minister Callaghan drove to Buckingham Palace last Friday to hand in his resignation to the Queen. Minutes after he left the palace precincts, Thatcher was on her way to "kiss hands" and receive the royal commission to form a government. Denis Thatcher accompanied his wife to the palace; like Prime Ministers' spouses before him, he remained downstairs to chat with the Queen's aides.

Following an audience that lasted 45 minutes, the Thatchers drove in a black Rover limousine to No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of Prime Ministers. The Callaghans had already packed and left, not in haste but in keeping with a longstanding British tradition that the transfer of power in all its aspects should be quick and decorous.

Downing Street was packed with well-wishers and photographers when Thatcher arrived. Expressing delight and excitement over her victory, Britain's "Iron Lady" made a conciliatory statement clearly addressed to a nation poised uneasily for change: "I would like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi, which I think are particularly apt at the moment: 'Where there is discord, may we bring harmony; where there is doubt, may we bring faith; where there is despair, may we bring hope.' Now that the election is over, may we get together and strive to serve and strengthen the country."

At Labor Party headquarters a few blocks away, "Sunny Jim" Callaghan, 67, spoke of his defeat with the same reserve and gentle dignity that marked his campaign. He publicly congratulated his successor as Prime Minister. "It is a great office," he said, "a wonderful privilege, and for a woman to occupy that office is, I think, a tremendous moment in the country's history. Therefore, everybody must on behalf of all our people wish her well and wish her success."

Callaghan, who easily recaptured his home constituency in Wales, now becomes leader of the opposition. He will be less tormented by the Labor Party's left wing, many of whose zealous members went down to defeat in marginal districts. So did the most able woman in his Cabinet, former Education Secretary Shirley Williams, 48. Another loser, predictably, was onetime Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe, 50, who soon faces trial on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder a man who claimed to be his lover. A Tory easily bested eight other candidates to take Thorpe's North Devon seat.

Throughout the four-week campaign, which was brought about when Callaghan's government narrowly lost a vote of confidence in March, both major parties emphasized that Britain faced a clear choice. Callaghan offered a continuation of the moderate social democratic policies that have dominated British political and economic life since the end of World War II. Thatcher presented a clear break with the socialist past, advocating a return to the market economy and a retrenching of Britain's welfare state. As some commentators saw it, Labor, in a reversal of traditional roles, had become the party of established orthodoxy, while the Conservatives advocated radical reform.

The Tories entered the campaign with a lead of up to 21% in early polling. That was largely a result of public anger and frustration over a bitter winter of strikes and industrial strife that severely undermined Labor's claim to be the only party that could deal successfully with Britain's powerful trade unions. As the campaign continued, the Tory lead steadily dwindled; two days before the election one poll even showed a slight Labor edge. There seemed little doubt about the reason for the decline: the personality of Margaret Thatcher. To avoid a major gaffe by their outspoken leader, Tory strategists designed a media campaign to keep her on camera but away from confrontation. Nevertheless, Thatcher's sometimes hectoring, sometimes condescending manner irritated many voters. In one poll last week, she ranked behind both Callaghan and the Liberals' David Steel as a campaign performer. In the end, though, the desire for change proved overwhelming, and on election day Britons voted in near record numbers for the Tories and their fighting lady.

Thatcher thus takes her place alongside Israel's Golda Meir, India's Indira Gandhi and Sri Lanka's Sirimavo Bandaranaike as modern women politicians who have made it to the top. In keeping with British tradition, Thatcher will be addressed simply as "Prime Minister." Even before she paid her first visit to Downing Street, her campaign aides had arrived, their arms loaded with paper work. The government of a determined woman whose work ethic had been forged in the heartland of England was taking shape with no delay.

Grantham, a market town of 28,000 in Lincolnshire, has three claims to fame: the 281-ft. spire of St. Wulfram's Church is the third highest in England, Sir Isaac Newton went to school there, and Margaret Hilda Thatcher (nee Roberts) was born and raised in an apartment over her family's grocery store at the corner of North Parade and Broad streets.

A bootmaker's son, Alfred Roberts was a pillar of the Methodist Church and once served as the mayor of Grantham. He and his wife Beatrice, a seamstress before her marriage, kept a well-appointed shop that also served as the local post office. They lived upstairs in spotless quarters, although the bathroom was in the backyard. For Margaret and her elder sister Muriel, now 57, family life in Grantham was frugal but warm, with a vision of something better: work hard, pay cash, save and get ahead. Years later, Thatcher remembered that "my parents embedded in us very strongly that work and cleanliness were next to godliness. There was more than just having to work to live—there was work as a duty."

Margaret Roberts, who was never called "Maggie," is remembered in Grantham as a studious, determined little girl with the cherubic looks of a cupid on a Victorian valentine. At the age of nine, she won a poetry-reading prize at the annual town festival. Her headmistress at Hunting Town Road Elementary School offered congratulations, saying, "You were lucky!" To which Margaret replied: "I wasn't lucky. I deserved it."

There are no recollections in Grantham of Margaret with chums or boyfriends. She was an exceptionally pretty girl, but very earnest. As teen-agers she and Muriel would help out in the store. Thatcher remembers fondly: "We used to stand in the shop sometimes late on a Saturday evening. It was quite a big shop, with all the beautiful mahogany fitments that I now see in the antique shops. A lot of people came in, and with Father on the [town] council, and knowing we were all interested in what was going on in the world, we would talk quite late." In this grass-roots setting, her conservative political views came into focus. By the time she was in her late teens, she has said, "politics was in my bloodstream."

A career in either politics or law, her other main interest, seemed beyond the family's means. "There was no question of my thinking I had a political future," she once observed. "We could not have afforded it . . . Somehow, if people wanted to get on in the world, they went into the professions. It made a good deal of impression on me that we were in trade. I've always been trade all my life."

But Alfred Roberts was determined that his daughters would have a better life than the family shop. "Very few girls from Grantham went to any university, much less Oxford," says John Foster, a local businessman. "But Margaret and her father were set on Oxford." The university required Latin for all entering students, a course not offered to girls in Grantham at that time. Roberts solved the problem: he hired a tutor for his daughter, and in three months she was able to meet the university's Latin qualifications.