BBC News with Charles Carroll

The former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has died in London at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke. Lady Thatcher transformed British politics after becoming Britain’s first woman prime minister in 1979. Her current successor, David Cameron, said she took a country that was on its knees and made it stand tall again. And the London mayor, Boris Johnson, said she challenged many of the established orthodoxies of the time.

"She was overwhelmingly right in her judgements. She was right about the unions. She was right about the threat of Soviet communism and I think she’d proved overwhelmingly right about the euro. She took on that cosy, clubby male-dominated consensus and she won.”

But Lady Thatcher’s

radical

policies divided Britain and more than 20 years later have polarised views of her legacy. She curbed the powers of trade unions, fought and won a bitter year-long

strike

with coal miners. Alan Cummings of the Durham Miners’ Association said some mining communities never recovered.

"A lot of people hated the woman, hated what she stood for, hated what she did to us. She has a legacy: a legacy of destruction, a legacy of destroying lives, a legacy of destroying communities.”

Margaret Thatcher, known as the Iron Lady, did much to reassert British influence on the international stage. She had a close relationship with the then American President Ronald Reagan over the ending of the Cold War and helped convince his successor George Bush Sr to attack Iraq. Lady Thatcher herself seized back the Falkland Islands invaded by Argentina in 1982. She opposed apartheid, but stood against the imposition of Commonwealth sanctions against South Africa and she fiercely defended Britain’s position in the European Union.