LONDON — Now we know why there were no Margaret Thatcher tea cups in
1979. The Iron Lady wouldn’t have it.
When her media adviser, Gordon Reece, said he had been inundated with
requests to lend her image to such souvenirs, she swiftly knocked it
down: “No (underlined) permission to be given at all on any grounds of
any kind.”
Newly released files from the first year of Thatcher’s 11-year run as
British prime minister show her to be as decisive on the big issues as
she was on the trivial ones that tied lesser figures into indecisive
knots.
Thatcher, for all her reputation as a hard-liner, rebuffed appeals from
U.S. President Jimmy Carter for a more demonstrative response to the
Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, saying it would do more harm than good,
according to papers in her personal files released Saturday.
The files cover the first eight months of Thatcher’s 11 1/2 years as
prime minister, giving glimpses of her embarking on an ambitious
domestic agenda to revive the economy and curb the unions, and engaging
with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran
on Nov. 4.
