MARGARET THATCHER, the Iron Lady, was the first woman to ever lead a major Western democracy, and was one of the most forceful politicians Britain has ever known.

Virtually every world leader she met stood in awe of her. Few made the mistake of underestimating her.

Thatcher was born on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, a market town in Lincolnshire. She was the second daughter of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, who were both Methodists.

Margaret and her older sister Muriel, were raised in a flat above the family shop.

Alfred, a grocer, councillor, and Grantham mayor, instilled in Margaret the virtues of the work ethic.

After the local grammar school she studied chemistry at Oxford University between 1943 and 1947, and also became president of the university Conservative Association.

Politics were always her main interest. In her mid-20s she cut her teeth by twice contesting the Labour-held seat of Dartford, London, at General Elections. She lost both times – but the experience proved invaluable.

It was in Dartford, too, that she met her husband, Denis. They married in 1951, and their children – twins Carol and Mark – were born two years later.

In the 1950s Thatcher, who had begun her career as an industrial chemist, trained as a lawyer, specialising in taxation. In 1959 she finally won a seat in Parliament –Finchley, in north London. No-one at the time could have foreseen that this bright, ambitious young woman would carve a niche in British political history.

She joined the government two years later as a Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. Throughout the 1960s she had a number of junior government posts and stints as shadow minister.

When Ted Heath took the Tories back into Number 10 in 1970, she was appointed Secretary of State for Education and Science.

But in 1971 came her first real taste of a political backlash. She decided to abolish free school milk for the over-sevens, so that the government could meet its election tax pledges.

Her Labour counterpart described it as 'the meanest and most unworthy thing' he had seen in 20 years. Worse, Thatcher earned the nickname of 'Milk Snatcher'. It would haunt her for years.

When the discredited Tory government lost to Labour in 1974, the time was ripe for a bold and outspoken new leader. Thatcher fitted the bill, but she had to wait until 1979 before finally getting power, defeating Labour's Jim Callaghan at the ballot box.

She believed that it was time that the country, too, needed a new direction. As she wrote in her memoirs, The Downing Street Years, democratic socialism had been given a prolonged experiment in Britain but had proved to be a 'miserable failure'.

What Britain witnessed over the next 11 years was Thatcherism – a full-blooded philosophy that embraced conviction politics, a sense that the dependency culture had to be replaced with an enterprise culture. State-owned utilities were to be privatised. The cossetted unions were to be confronted. The money supply would be controlled more tightly. Britain had to be stripped of what Thatcher described as its 'sick man of Europe' status.

Council house tenants were allowed to buy their homes – a radical move. But another idea, the Poll Tax, was, however, widely hated.

Thatcher's popularity was dipping by the time of the Falklands War in 1982. Her quick, determined response, despatching a Task Force to reclaim the islands from the Argentinian forces, strengthened her reputation.

She narrowly escaped death in October 1984 when the IRA blew up the Grand Hotel, in Brighton.

But even someone of Thatcher's energy and self-belief runs out of luck and electoral popularity. She stepped down as PM and party leader in 1990. A famous photograph shows her with a tear in her eye as she was driven away from Downing Street.

She retired from the House at the 1992 election, aged 66, and became a peer.

Thatcher generally lived a quiet retirement.

Her beloved husband, Denis, passed away in June 2003, aged 88. She had often said that she could not have achieved what she did without his help and support. She described him as "the golden thread running through my life" – the man "who has made everything possible."

Her daughter, Carol, a journalist and author wrote movingly about her mother's dementia. She revealed that she had to repeatedly break the "truly awful" news of her father Denis's death to her mother until it eventually sank in.

Her brother, Sir Mark, who inherited the title after his father's death, was given a four-year suspended sentence and fined £265,000 in South Africa in 2005 over the funding of a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea. Though he has always denied any knowledge a coup was being plotted, he admitted he had "unwittingly" helped bankroll it.

He received multi- million commissions for foreign contracts while his mother was PM, and was investigated in South Africa for loan sharking.

Mark appeared to be his mother's favourite, and she lost her composure when he was briefly lost in the Algerian desert while taking part in the 1982 Paris-Dakar rally.

'SHE'S THE BEST MAN IN ENGLAND...'

MARGARET THATCHER enjoyed 11 eventful years in power at Number 10 – dealing with crises, engaging in 'handbag diplomacy', and trying to inject new life into Britain and its economy.

But nothing in those 11 years stands out more than 11 crucial weeks in 1982.

The Falklands War was one of the defining issues of her time in office.

The Argentinians had indulged in what Thatcher would later describe as 'aggressive rhetoric' over the Falklands – but the actual invasion, on April 2 came as a surprise.

It was grim news for the Falkland islanders. It was grimmer news still for the London Government 8000 miles away.

For Thatcher, there could only be one answer: to counter the invaders with force.

In her memoirs, nine years later, she said it was important to fight for the islands in the South Atlantic – but, just as important, to defend Britain's 'honour as a nation' and the principles that aggressors should never succeed, that international law should prevail over the use of force.

A military task force was assembled in double-quick time and set sail for the Falklands.

Eventually Britain would send some 28,000 troops and more than 100 ships south. Argentina had 12,000 soldiers, mainly conscripts, on the islands.

Britain re-took South Georgia on April 25. On May 1 the RAF began an aerial assault, on the airport at Port Stanley, the island's capital.

There were heavy losses on both sides.

On May 2 the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, was sunk with the loss of 368 lives. The British destroyer, HMS Sheffield, was struck by an Exocet missile and sank with the loss of 20 crew.

On May 21, British troops landed at San Carlos. Then came the bloody battle for Goose Green, and the long, cold, march towards Stanley.

On June 8, while preparing to unload soldiers from the Welsh Guards in Port Pleasant, the supply ship Sir Galahad was attacked by the Argentinian airforce. A total of 48 soldiers and seamen were killed.

But a week later, British forces proved too much for the invaders, who surrendered. Stanley was liberated on June 14.

All told, 655 Argentine, 255 British servicemen and three Falklanders lost their lives in the conflict. But the Falklands had been restored as a British colony.

Thatcher took great credit for her decisive action.

The Falklands victory, and a solid economy, helped the Tories surge to a General Election triumph in 1983.

Thatcher herself said the Falklands War had "enormous" significance both for British self-confidence and its world standing.

British foreign policy, she said, had been in retreat since the Suez Crisis in 1956. "Victory in the Falklands changed that," she wrote. "Everywhere I went after the war, Britain's name meant something more than it had."

In her time in office, Thatcher became a familiar presence on the international stage.

She was respected – and in some cases even feared – right across the world's political spectrum.

She was admired, even doted upon, by American presidents, and detested by many leaders of African states.

Perhaps the most difficult world leader, from her viewpoint, was the late Indira Gandhi. Their meetings in Delhi seemed to prove the theory that powerful women, although happy to deal with their equals if male, simply cannot do business together.

But her Kremlin favourite was Mikhail Gorbachev, the man she famously could do business with. Sir Bernard Ingham, her press secretary, said that the chemistry between them was "quite extraordinary".

Gorbachev's reform campaign, of course, helped bring about the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

President Ronald Reagan doted on Thatcher. The feeling was reciprocated and during this period the so-called 'special relationship' between the UK and the US was particularly warm. In 1983, he said of her: "She is the best man in England."