MARGARET Thatcher was the woman who, almost single-handedly and in the space of one tumultuous decade, transformed a nation.

Tireless, fearless and unshakeable, she was Britain’s first woman Prime Minister – and the first leader to win three General Elections in a row.

Mrs Thatcher, who became Baroness Thatcher, resigned after 11 years as Prime Minister in November 1990.

But history will proclaim her as one of the greatest British Prime Ministers.

Margaret Thatcher towered above all other political figures in Britain and her dominance of the Cabinet was supreme and rarely challenged. Yet the Iron Lady was not all stern, steely and strident.

She was delightful with children and she could not disguise her glee – “We are a grandmother” – when her grandson Michael was born in February, 1989.

Her downfall came about during the second of two challenges to her leadership. She realised that if she stayed on to take her challenger Michael Heseltine – a man she disliked intensely, personally and politically – into a second ballot, he would almost certainly supplant her. But there was no let-up in her activities once she arrived in the House of Lords. She remained a ferocious critic of the European Union, and led a crusade against the Maastricht Treaty.

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire. She quickly had the virtues of thrift, hard work, morality and patriotism drilled into her by her beloved father Alderman Alfred Roberts, who ran two grocers’ shops and a post-office.

She never forgot his words to her: “You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t work, girl.”

Her associates at school and university recall her as industrious, serious-minded, and soberly dressed, but also possessing what one of them has since described as “an irritating sense of her own superiority”.

She became head girl at Kesteven and Grantham Girls’' High School. She went on a bursary to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read chemistry. Her principal at Oxford described her as “a perfectly good second-class scientist”.

She became only the third woman president of the University’s Conservative Association. She continued to work as a chemist until 1954 when she switched to become a barrister specialising in tax.

In 1951 she married Denis Thatcher, a shrewd industrialist. They had twins, Mark and Carol, by Caesarean.

Mrs Thatcher launched into her battle to get into Parliament by unsuccessfully fighting Dartford in 1950 and in 1951.

She finally entered the Commons in 1959 as member for Finchley, a seat she represented throughout her career.

When the Heath administration took office in 1970, Mrs Thatcher became Education Secretary. She quickly became a hate figure on the Labour benches, branded ‘Thatcher the Milk Snatcher’ after stopping free milk for primary schoolchildren.

General Election defeats in February and October 1974 gave Mrs Thatcher the opportunity she sought. She defeated Willie Whitelaw and in 1975 became the first woman Conservative leader.

As Prime Minister, she set to work. The state was to be “rolled back” in a huge programme of privatisation. Trade union power was to be curbed and laws introduced to make it harder to strike.

She rejected demand for increased public spending in the face of world recession, stood firm against bloody inner-city riots, and refused to bow to IRA threats over hunger strikers.

When US President Ronald Reagan arrived on the scene there was an instant rapport, a close and abiding friendship.

Her most formidable test was to come in 1982 when Argentina invaded the Falklands. The Argentine dictator Galtieri had underestimated the lady.

When she went to the country in 1983 the nation swept her back to power with an overall majority of more than 140. The miners had succeeded in toppling Heath in 1974. A decade later, Thatcher was made of sterner stuff.

The strike, one of the most bitter to hit Britain, surged on for a year, with violent clashes between police and pickets. After a year, the strike fizzled out. Miners were dejected and hate lingered for decades in Britain’s coalfields.

She privatised water, electricity, gas, telecommunications, and whatever else came to hand.

Her narrowest escape came in the 1984 Brighton bombing when the IRA failed to assassinate her with an explosion which shattered the seafront Grand Hotel during the Tory conference.

Despite the deaths, the conference went ahead the next morning when she told delegates: “All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.” Her rapport with the Soviet leader Mikhael Gorbachev was, in a different way, as warm as that with President Reagan. “I can do business with him,” she once declared.

She went to the country again in 1987 and swept home by a 101 majority.

Her final 12 months in Downing Street were full of dangerous discontent.

When she stunned the world by announcing her resignation, her exit was as grand as all her entrances. She followed this up by delivering a shattering speech in the Commons in the face of a vote of no confidence.

She suffered a devastating blow in June, 2003 when Denis, died after a short illness. Stories started to emerge that she was losing her memory and becoming confused. But she continued to attend the House of Lords from time to time.

In February, 2007, Lady Thatcher became the first ex-PM in history to have a statue of herself unveiled in the House of Commons while alive.