Forty years ago, as a member of a delegation to discuss the plight of Soviet Jewry, I met Margaret Thatcher prior to her 1987 visit to meet Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow – someone she said she “could do business with.”
She was remarkably informed about the Soviet refuseniks – Ida Nudel, Vladimir Slepak, and Natan Sharansky – whose names she dropped with regularity during the conversation. However, she seemed to be someone who was more interested in putting an end to Communism than securing exit permits for the refuseniks who wanted to move to Israel.
There is no doubt that she felt strongly about human rights in the USSR and the cause of Soviet Jews, but she saw herself first and foremost as a modern Boadicea leading a battalion of Cold War warriors.
Her odyssey through life is told in great detail in Charles Moore’s reverential biography Margaret Thatcher (Allen Lane 2025). It has been published to mark the centenary of her birth and has been compiled from the three volumes published previously.
In 1958, Thatcher won the safe seat of Finchley, a constituency with a large Jewish population, by a sliver of just three votes. Voted in by a huge majority at the next election, she had won back many Conservative-voting Jews who had deserted to the Liberals because of an attempt to block Jews from becoming members of the local golf club.
For many Jews in the area, it had been a journey from the impoverished East End of London of their parents to the leafy suburbs of northwest London, to settle in Finchley’s “prosperous, petit-bourgeois, owner-occupied suburban” constituency.
There is no doubt that Thatcher admired Jews for their community spirit, entrepreneurial skills, scholarly prowess, and general contribution to British society.
An admirer of controversial British politician Enoch Powell, Thatcher was similarly a polarizing figure with a talent to divide – and this also took place among Finchley’s Jews. The Orthodox Jewish community rapturously embraced her; non-Orthodox Jews – who belonged to Masorti, Reform, or Liberal synagogues – generally detested her.
Following the defeat of the Conservatives at the polls in 1974, Thatcher ousted Edward Heath as its leader. Although she was an admirer of Victorian prime minister William Gladstone – a leader of the Liberal party – she looked to two Jews to help her structure and polish her political ideology.
Thatcherism emerged due to the ideas of an anglicized, aristocratic intellectual Sir Keith Joseph, and a former Stalinist Alfred Sherman. They could not have been more different.
Sherman was born to impoverished Russian Jewish immigrants in London and went to Hackney Downs grammar school, home to many Jewish boys such as the former head of the Mossad, Ephraim Halevi, and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter.
His journey was remarkable because, as a Communist, he had fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, crossed from the political Left to the political Right, and laid the foundations of Thatcherism. Moore remarks that even after his move to the Right, he maintained “a Marxist rigour of thought.”
Thatcherism emphasized private enterprise, rolling back the state, cutting taxes, privatization, and deregulation. Council renters were given the right to buy their own homes. She was also determined to break the trade unions; this led to the year-long miners’ strike of 1984-1985. It resulted in a victory for Thatcher and sparked the decline of the Trades Union movement. It was a watershed in British politics; Thatcherism was unlike anything resembling the conservatism of the past.
Thatcher first visited Israel in June 1965 and was duly impressed. She considered the Jewish nation to be both “heroic and pro-Western.” The author notes that there was great power rivalry in the Middle East, and that the Kremlin was determined to subvert the Arab oil-producing states. This troubled Thatcher greatly. In her opinion, Israel was the only state that could be depended upon. It was also central to her thinking about the Palestinian right to self-determination, which she regarded as not “the sole determinant.”
In May 1986, she made an official visit as prime minister to Israel and addressed the Knesset. She also became the first Western leader to meet Palestinian leaders – but not the PLO – during a visit to Israel. Azriel Bermant’s excellent book Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East deals with her specific and perhaps complex relationship with Israel.
She was “extremely ill-disposed” toward both Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir – and ironically preferred Labor’s Shimon Peres in her dealings with Israel. She recalled that the Irgun and Lehi had been led by Begin and Shamir respectively, and labeled them as “biblical times men.”
Her bitterness toward Begin stemmed from the Irgun’s demolition of the King David Hotel in July 1946, in which 91 people were killed, including Julius Jacobs and Edward Sperling, who had served in the Jewish Legion with Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky in World War I.
Moore relates a meeting in 1981 with then-Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, in which Thatcher commented tearfully about the killing of two British sergeants, Mervyn Paice and Clifford Martin, in July 1947.
While such views undoubtedly pleased the Arabist mandarins of the British Foreign Office, she also opposed them by resisting moves to meet PLO representatives.
Thatcher was extremely close to the then-British chief rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, who was known as “her favourite religious leader.” Jakobovits’s broadly conservative views mirrored her own. He also shared her antipathy toward Begin.
She admired King Hussein, who was educated at Harrow, the elite British school, and attended Sandhurst as an officer cadet. She thereby welcomed the Amman Accord of February 1985 between the Jordanians and the PLO.
While the Americans vetoed any PLO participation in a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, Thatcher took a risk and decided to meet “two well-known moderates.”
External events – such as the murder by the Palestine Liberation Front of the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, whom they threw overboard from the Achille Lauro cruise ship – conspired to wreck any progress on Hussein’s initiative. On arrival in London, the Palestinian delegates made further demands, and the meeting with Thatcher did not take place.
Thatcher had a close working relationship with US president Ronald Reagan. Shortly after the end of the Falklands War, the Argentinians wanted to buy Skyhawk A-4 fighter aircraft from Israel, which required US approval. The president was willing but Thatcher was not – and so the sale did not proceed.
When Thatcher died in 2013, her funeral was attended by Queen Elizabeth II and many other notables. There were heartfelt accolades from admirers, but there were also displays of black humour from her critics. The song “Ding Dong – the Witch is Dead,” from the Wizard of Oz, reached number two on the music charts. Her defiant statement “The Lady’s not for turning” became “The Lady’s not for returning.”
Even figures in New Labour, such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, recognized her contribution – albeit diplomatically. But it is perhaps the fact that she was only the second woman prime minister in the Western world, after Golda Meir, which was appreciated by both supporters and critics. As Barack Obama mentioned at the time: “After Mrs. Thatcher, there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.”
Charles Moore’s one volume biography is a superb, definitive, and informative distillation of the life and times of the Iron Lady.
Jerusalem Post 7 December 2025