MARGARET Thatcher died of a stroke Monday at age 87 and UK Prime Minister David Cameron's praise - "a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton" - was both accurate and deserved.
Yet Cameron's Conservative Party leadership, constrained by the necessity of the Liberal Democrats, suffers in comparison. He may be able to turn a page, but it's unlikely the majority of his party will ever forget the Iron Lady - or the three successive majorities the party enjoyed under her leadership.
The daughter of a grocer, Thatcher's middle-class heritage was not that different to Ted Heath's or John Major's. But she held to her smaller government, free-market principles more fiercely than a wolverine, demonstrating indomitable strength in the face of the virulent opposition of the British labour movement.
For many Brits, Thatcher exacerbated the divide between the haves and the have-nots while the country rolled in North Sea oil money. But her 11 years of power saw an unprecedented revival of entrepreneurial spirit.
Arguably she facilitated the resurgence of the Labour Party by taking her own party so far to the right she left room in the centre. And indeed it was her own party that finally pushed her out, not the electors - as much for her style as for her continued antipathy to the European Union.
She did indeed polarize her country, but for a brief period in 1982 she stood for all who remembered "Great" Britain as a world power when she sought and achieved a military victory in the Falklands War.
