A Prime Minister who pledged to bring faith, truth, harmony and lots of hope

CAST from the bronze of a Russian cannon captured during the Crimean War, the statue of Grantham’s most respected child gazes down on the streets of the Lincolnshire market town.

Sir Isaac Newton’s genius laid the foundations of modern science, and his discoveries influenced others to break down barriers and unleash the industrial and technological revolutions.

But it was another child of Grantham – also a scientist, but as yet not immortalised in bronze – who was to turn Britain upside down by demolishing old certainties and creating a new set of rules.

ON THE HOME FRONT: Mrs Thatcher shows she can muck in

Love her or hate her, admire or despise, applaud her or loath the very ground upon which her stiletto heels clicked, everyone had an opinion of Margaret Hilda Thatcher.

The floral-bloused ladies at the party conference; the miner warming his hands at the picket-line fire; the Young Conservatives with their cheering voices and wild adoration; the steelworker gazing on dead furnaces; the businessmen slicing up nationalised industries; Greenham Common women keeping vigil at the fence; the council house tenant proudly buying into property; the homeless huddled in subways; City starlets with their sleek cars and sharp suits; shipyard workers clutching P45s – all were caught up in the maelstrom of Thatcherism, all had their views, their opinions, their experiences.

To some she brought wealth, to others despair, but all felt the force of the woman from Grantham. She has no bronze statue in the town’s market place – but what does an Iron Lady need with an effigy in another metal?

And now, a day after her death, we can look back with the benefit of hindsight and ask: what did Margaret Thatcher do for Britain and for our region? We know what she destroyed – but what did she actually create and leave behind?

What does Margaret Thatcher mean to the North- East and North Yorkshire?

MOTHER AND CHILDREN: Mrs Thatcher with the twins

What is the Iron Lady’s legacy

Was she the clear-headed and astute leader who recognised that the nationalised industries were monolithic, over-manned anachronisms of the postwar rebuilding programme; or was she the cold and calculating wrecker, fuelled by spite and intent on destroying union power bases and the Enemy Within?

IN THE BEGINNING: The corner shop in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on October 13, 1925. This is where she grew up before going to university and entering politics as a Conservative Party hopeful in the 1950s

Were her financial policies – privatisation, the trickledown effect, generous tax cuts for the wealthy, share ownership, council house sales, the poll tax – genuine attempts at forging a new Britain with a new set of values in which all, poor as well as rich, would eventually benefit; or were they crude attempts at redefining a society whose divisions had been blurred by two world wars and the emergence of a consumer-led economy?

Ask the conference devotees with their fluttering Union flags. Ask the Durham miners as they follow their banners over Elvet Bridge every July.

THE BIG DAY: Denis and Margaret get married

Each will have a different answer.

And this is Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. She affected everyone. She left a vivid and unshakeable image in the minds of those who lived through her era. She entered the 1980s as a dynamic Prime Minister, and left her footprints all over the decade for her successors to follow.

SO where did it all begin? Grantham. A small and unremarkable town in what is probably England’s flattest county, with a population of about 30,000 and a statue of Sir Isaac Newton.

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in 1925, on October 13 – which was a Tuesday, not a Friday – the daughter of Beatrice and Alfred Roberts, a grocer and Conservative councillor.

The family home was 6 North Parade, Margaret’s birthplace.

Her father took over the property in 1919 and used the ground floor as a grocery, tobacconists and sub-post office.

After going to Oxford and taking degrees in chemistry and law, she worked briefly in scientific research before marrying Denis Thatcher in 1951, and, two years later, gave birth to twins Mark and Carol.

MADE IT: After years of campaigning, and reaching the position of Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher finally makes it to the steps of No 10 Downing Street in May 1979. She is pictured with her husband, Denis

She stood for Parliament twice, without success, before winning the staunchly Tory north London seat of Finchley in 1959.

She rose through the Tory ranks until, in the Heath government of the early 1970s, she entered the Cabinet – and the public psyche – as Education Minister where she is remembered, solely and contemptuously, for robbing schoolchildren of free milk and the first of her many nicknames – Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.

After Edward Heath’s defeat by Harold Wilson’s Labour Party – brought about largely by the unions and in particular the miners – she made a bid for the leadership. Against all the odds, she snatched victory to become the first woman leader of the Conservative Party.

In May 1979, she fought her first General Election as Tory leader, defeating an embattled James Callaghan whose premiership had been irreparably undermined during the notorious Winter of Discontent.

Those who remember that day in May, the day that changed the face and the mood of Britain for ever, will recall her words on the steps of Downing Street, the quotation of St Francis of Assisi she so unashamedly privatised: “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.”

Things would never be the same. Britain, almost immediately, was to tremble before the forces of Thatcherism.