Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the controversial "Iron Lady" who shaped a generation of British politics, died following a stroke on Monday at the age of 87, her spokesman said.
Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister David Cameron led tributes to Britain's first woman premier, a right-wing titan and key figure in the Cold War.
"It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning," spokesman Lord Tim Bell said, referring to Thatcher's children.
The former premier, who led Britain from 1979 to 1990, suffered from dementia and has appeared rarely in public in recent years.
She was last in hospital in December for a minor operation to remove a growth from her bladder.
The former Conservative Party leader remains the only female premier in British history and was the 20th century's longest continuous occupant of Downing Street.
Her daughter once revealed that the former premier had to be repeatedly reminded that her husband Denis had died in 2003.
She was told by doctors to quit public speaking a decade ago after a series of minor strokes.
"The Queen was sad to hear the news of the death of Baroness Thatcher. Her Majesty will be sending a private message of sympathy to the family," Buckingham Palace said.
Cameron said: "It was with great sadness that I learned of the death of Lady Thatcher. We have lost a great leader, a great Prime Minister and a great Briton."
Michael Howard, Conservative leader from 2003-2005, told Sky News television: "It's terribly sad news. She was a titan in British politics.
"I believe she saved the country, she transformed our economy and I believe she will go down in history as one of our very greatest prime ministers."
Right-wingers hailed her as having hauled Britain out of the economic doldrums but the left accused her of dismantling traditional industry, claiming her reforms helped unpick the fabric of society.
On the world stage, she built a close "special relationship" with US president Ronald Reagan which helped bring the curtain down on Soviet Communism. She also fiercely opposed closer ties with Europe.
Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925 in the market town of Grantham, eastern England, the daughter of a grocer.
After grammar school and a degree in chemistry at Oxford University, she married businessman Denis in 1951 and two years later had twins, Carol and Mark.
She was first elected to the House of Commons in 1959 and succeeded former prime minister Edward Heath as opposition Conservative leader in 1975 before becoming premier four years later.
Her enduring legacy can be summed up as "Thatcherism" -- a set of policies which supporters say promoted personal freedom and broke down the class divisions that had riven Britain for centuries.
Pushing her policies through pitched Thatcher's government into a string of tough battles, though.
When Argentina invaded the remote British territory of the Falkland Islands in 1982, Thatcher dispatched troops and ships, securing victory in two months.
'The lady's not for turning' -- Thatcher in quotes
Margaret Thatcher, who died aged 87 following a stroke on Monday, was nothing if not quotable. Here are some the former British prime minister's most famous phrases:
-- "I speak as a very young Tory, and we are entitled to speak, for it is the people of my generation who will bear the brunt of the change from the trials of the past into calmer channels." (Thatcher, then Oxford University student Margaret Roberts, in her first recorded political speech, June 1945)
-- "I don't think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime." (Thatcher on BBC television, March 1973)
-- "If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman." (Attributed)
-- "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope... There is now work to be done." (Thatcher quotes Saint Francis of Assisi and recently murdered Conservative member of parliament Airey Neave on her first day in Downing Street, May 1979)
-- "We are simply asking to have our own money back" although it is famously often misquoted as: "I want my money back." (Thatcher demands a budget rebate for Britain at a 1984 European summit)
-- "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning." (Thatcher holds her ground on her criticised economic policies at the Tories' annual conference, October 1980)
-- "Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the marines... Rejoice." (Thatcher hails the April 1982 recapture of South Georgia in the Falkland Islands from Argentina. Often misquoted as: "Rejoice! Rejoice!" April 1982)
-- "I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society -- from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain." (Thatcher outlines her political philosophy to business leaders. February 1984)
-- "We have ceased to be a nation in retreat... We rejoice that Britain has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before." (Thatcher takes stock of the "Falklands factor", July 1982)
-- "And now it must be business as usual." (Thatcher refuses to let the Irish Republican Army bombing of her seafront hotel in Brighton, southern England in October 1984 stop the Conservative conference)
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- "I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together." (Thatcher speaks to the BBC after meeting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1984, five years before the end of the Cold War)
-- "There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people, and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate." (Interview published in October 1987 in Women's Own magazine)
-- "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels." (Thatcher's seminal Bruges address on Europe, in September 1988)
-- "We have become a grandmother." (Thatcher announces the birth of her first grandchild, March 1989)
-- "I shall fight on, I shall fight to win." (Thatcher vows to contest a second ballot of an internal Conservative Party leadership contest, November 21, 1990)
-- "I confirm it is my intention to let my name go forward for the second ballot." (Thatcher, in Paris for a conference, vows to fight on after winning a majority of the vote in a Conservative leadership contest. But the margin is insufficient and she later steps down. November 22, 1990.)
-- "We're leaving Downing Street for the last time after eleven-and-a-half wonderful years, and we're very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came." (A tearful Thatcher as she left office on November 28, 1990 after being ousted as Conservative leader)
Thatcher's dramatic 1990 fall: 'Stabbed in the front'
At some point in her 11-year rule, Margaret Thatcher adopted the royal prerogative of referring to herself in the plural - as when she announced the birth of a child to her daughter Carol in 1989.
"We have become a grandmother," she declared archly, suggesting to those Britons who resented her hectoring style that their first woman prime minister may be on the verge of usurping the Queen of England.
So when Thatcher abruptly fell from power in a few tense weeks at the end of 1990, it had all the drama of a Shakespearean tragedy. Reporters watched in stunned surprise as a historic, transformational leader was toppled by hubris and a fierce political attack by a once-loyal courtier.
The action unfolded in three scenes - the historic House of Commons chamber in Britain's parliament, a cobbled courtyard in Paris and Thatcher's prime ministerial offices in London.
Only months before her exit from Downing Street, Thatcher was riding high, confident of election to a record fourth successive term. Her reforms had transformed the creaking British social structure and she stood tall as a world figure who had helped win the Cold War.
Despite political setbacks that left her trailing in some opinion polls, she was already thinking beyond the next election. "There was still much that I wanted to do," she said in her autobiography "The Downing Street Years".
Then in late October 1990 the issue of European integration, which Thatcher fiercely opposed but many in her party supported, blew up in her face, triggering a sequence of events that allowed two fellow Conservatives to bring her down.
Sir Geoffrey Howe, her mild-mannered, owlish former minister for finance and foreign affairs who believed deeply in European unity, was finally provoked to revolt by her dismissive rejection of integration at an EU summit in Rome.
Michael Heseltine, a self-made multimillionaire who had long dreamed of the highest office, challenged her for the party leadership in a poll set that November, finally showing his hand after, as Thatcher said, "lurking in the wings".
SCENE ONE: A PACKED HOUSE OF COMMONS
As she said in her autobiography, in a chapter she pointedly titled "Men in Lifeboats", the critical blow came from Howe, then deputy prime minister, in his resignation speech to parliament on Nov. 13.
For those of us listening in the press gallery in the packed House, the only sound apart from the portly Howe's measured speech came from intakes of breath by members amazed by the attack after his decades of deference to the steely Thatcher.
The speech was couched in courteous terms - even with some cricket analogies. But its barbed thrusts condemning Thatcher's refusal to budge on Europe sliced down on her as she sat grimly on the front bench."Underneath the mask of composure, my emotions were turbulent," she said.
Howe concluded: "The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long."
No one present doubted that Thatcher was in trouble.
Two days after that speech, which Thatcher described as "an act of bile and treachery", Heseltine challenged her for the Conservative leadership. By the time the party voted a week later, many did indeed reconsider their own loyalty to her.
SCENE TWO: A COBBLED COURTYARD
Thatcher later conceded that she was overconfident and did not work hard enough to shore up her support. When the vote was held on Tuesday, November 20, she was at a summit of big powers in Paris called to set a new world order after the Cold War.
Thatcher and close aides including her private secretary, Peter Morrison, sat in a room under the roof of the British ambassador's residence on the exclusive Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore awaiting the result to be telephoned from London.
"There was a brief silence after Morrison got the numbers," Bernard Ingham, Thatcher's veteran spokesman, told me later. But it was instantly clear: she had failed to win outright on the first ballot, putting her control of the party in jeopardy.
Thatcher and her entourage hurried down the stairs and burst out into a small, cobbled courtyard, pushing a BBC correspondent away from a live microphone to address a knot of reporters as we waited for her response.
She said she was disappointed not to have had the votes to clinch victory under the complex party rules but would go on to the second round of voting. On returning to London on Wednesday, November 21, she declared: "I fight on; I fight to win."
SCENE THREE: THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER
Within hours, it was clear that the absolute control Thatcher had exercised over her Cabinet colleagues for more than a decade had cracked.
Even before she met with top party figures, her husband Denis, who always walked a few paces behind her in public but was the most influential person in her life, was privately dubious. "Don't go on, love," she recalled him saying.
For 12 hours that day, Thatcher had one-on-one meetings with top Tories in her secluded office tucked away in the sprawling neo-gothic parliament on the north bank of the Thames as she tried to gauge her support in a runoff with Heseltine.
A few expressed total support and said she would still win. But as the hours went by, marked by the doleful peels of the heavy bell in the tower of Big Ben, her prospects became more and more gloomy.
The oft-repeated refrain from party elders was: "Of course I will back you but I do not believe you will win". The unsaid message was that the party did not believe it could win the next general election with Thatcher as its leader.
She was bitter. In her memoir, she described one colleague as "deserting at the first whiff of grapeshot".
After a typical short night of sleep, she informed her staff at 7:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 22 that she was resigning. She held her last Cabinet meeting and went to Buckingham Palace to inform Queen Elizabeth.
EPILOGUE
Many years later, Howe summed up Thatcher's fate in his own ironic, bookish style: "The insistence on the undivided sovereignty of her own opinion dressed up as the nation's sovereignty was her own undoing".
Compromise candidate John Major eventually won the contest to succeed her, scotching the naked power play by her archrival Heseltine. Thatcher loyalist Edward Leigh later commented: "At least (Heseltine) stabbed her in the front".
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