Do we like them?

Do we like Margaret Thatcher?

Our score: 3 out of 10. Real firsts and the odd decent act, set against Section 28, a veto on a HIV broadcast, opposing apartheid sanctions and defending Pinochet.

Thatcher died on 8 April 2013, and the obituaries split exactly as you'd expect. To admirers she changed Britain; to critics she was the villain of the 1980s. The LGBTQ+ press covered her death as the passing of a controversial figure on gay issues, which tells you where this page's readers sit.

Start with the odd bit of good news. PinkNews reports she voted in favour of decriminalising homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967, which wasn't a given for a Tory back then. Twenty years later she was prime minister, and the tone had changed completely.

At the October 1987 Conservative conference she said: “Children are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” Her government then passed Section 28, which PinkNews describes as banning the teaching or promotion of homosexuality. That's the harm test in a nutshell: her words, her government's law, and a generation of kids and teachers told to stay quiet.

Abroad, she opposed sanctions on apartheid South Africa and in 1987 called Mandela's ANC a “typical terrorist organization”, per the Globe and Mail. David Cameron later said she was wrong on sanctions and on those attacks. After Pinochet's arrest in London she called it a “judicial kidnapping” and said it was done in circumstances that would credit a police state, according to RFE/RL.

Her defenders will point to the breadth of her premiership and the 1967 vote, and the AIDS campaign did go ahead on her watch. Where you land on the economy and the miners is a political call this page won't make for you. On the question we ask, would we support her, the answer is no: the harm is in her own words and her government's laws.

Nothing new on her lately that we could source and date, so this is the long view. The pattern across the decade is the thing: when LGBTQ+ people, Black South Africans and Chile's victims needed the most powerful person in Britain on their side, she mostly wasn't.