by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) It’s all about Margaret Thatcher today on most of the front pages of newspapers across the world so I thought it would be interesting to survey some of the big papers from around the globe.
The Daily Mail’s poster pic of the Iron Lady with the headline “The woman who saved Britain” says so much about that doggedly conservative paper while a similar treatment by The Guardian with the quote “She became harder than hard” speaks volumes for its liberal, working-class stance and history.
I really like The Guardian’s treatment because I think it goes beyond ideology. It pays tribute to the massive effect Thatcher had on Britain but also projects the paper’s view that she tore the guts out of the country.
It’s very interesting to see how on opposite sides of the globe that the China Daily and The New York Post don’t give two hoots about the Baroness while Le Figaro is seemingly paying tribute to her courage. (Let’s not forget how Thatcher loathed Europe!)
Most papers used “Iron Lady” in the headline – rightly so – as it was very apt and she herself rather fancied the nickname, we believe. If you’re wondering where Iron Lady comes from, this entry on Russiapedia says:
On January 24, 1977, the Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) newspaper, in an article about Margaret Thatcher, the then-Prime Minister of Great Britain, called her “Iron Woman,” which, translated by the British Sunday Times newspaper as “Iron Lady,” sparked the universally known moniker Thatcher had been known by her entire political career.
On January 19, 1976, Thatcher, the Conservative leader at that time, claimed in one of her speeches that the Russians were striving for world domination. In response to that, the Soviet Defense Ministry, in the official Krasnaya Zvezda paper, published an article by military journalist Yury Gavrilov entitled “The Iron Woman Threatens…” The author said that was the name Thatcher had received in her own country. In reality, Thatcher did have a likely moniker prior to that — she had once been dubbed by a British journalist as “Iron Maiden,” after the midieval German torture device.
However, it was the Russian version she herself liked. By then, Thatcher had already earned herself a reputation as the “anti-communism crusader.”
“Here I am, standing in front of you in my green evening dress, with a touch of makeup, and fair curly hair. How am I not the ‘Iron Lady’ of the Western world?” she joked once at a banquet in London. She used her new “name” during her electoral campaign in 1979, which was conducted under the slogan “Britain needs an Iron Lady.”
