She wasn’t even prime minister, but merely the head of the opposition Conservative Party in Britain when, this week (Jan. 19) in 1976, Margaret “Maggie” Thatcher gave the speech that would earn her the nickname, “The Iron Lady.”
She gave the speech at a town hall meeting in Kensington, a district in London’s West End, and her theme was the increasing threat that the Soviet Union posed to European and world peace. And reminiscent of both her future political soul mate, Ronald Reagan, and her illustrious political predecessor, Winston Churchill, she decried the military build-up of the Soviet Union and the West’s flaccid military response. The Soviets, she said, “were bent on world dominance,” as illustrated by the fact that Warsaw Pact forces outnumbered those of NATO by “150,000 men, nearly 10,000 tanks, and 2,600 aircraft.” Further, she complained, the Soviet Politburo “puts guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.”
Also, just as Churchill had argued in the 1940s that only a strong Anglo-American alliance would ensure victory in World War II, Thatcher made the same case for winning the Cold War. It greatly depended on a strong commitment to the “Atlantic alliance,” in which Britain remained closely aligned with her traditional ally, the United States.
“The Conservative Party has the vital task of shaking the British public out of a long sleep,” Thatcher proclaimed at the end of her speech, which she clearly intended to echo Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech (delivered in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946), in which he re-focused the United States and its western allies on the Soviet Union’s territorial expansion, beginning with its placing Eastern Europe behind an “Iron Curtain” of Soviet control. Thatcher hoped to remind the United States and its western allies, including her fellow British citizens, that the Soviet aim of world domination had not gone away.
Speaking of “Iron,” among those who took notice of this fiery speech was the newspaper, Red Star, the official news organ of the Soviet Army, and in reporting on this speech the paper dubbed her “The Iron Lady.” The editors intended it as an insult — they meant to compare her with Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s (then Prussia) controversial 19th Century chancellor, whose nickname the “Iron Chancellor” came from his call for “iron and blood” — military force — in uniting the German city-states.
Far from being insulted, Thatcher embraced the nickname. “I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my fair hair gently waved, Iron Lady of the Western world,” she later said proudly to members of her party, adding, “A Cold War warrior … Yes, I am an Iron Lady!”
