Thatcher shared qualities with Mandela and Mbeki

Margaret Thatcher famously told her Conservative Party at its conference in Brighton in October 1980: "The lady's not for turning."

Facing down pressure to reverse her liberalisation of the British economy, which had already caused unemployment to rise by a third to two million, she signalled, just 18 months into her premiership, what kind of a leader she would be. Looking back across 23 years to her 11 years in Downing Street, that conviction defines her leadership.

Her death on Monday made headlines across the world as the pre-written obituaries for the woman who had been ailing for a decade rolled out. But she was not awarded the immediate absolution given to so many of the world's controversial leaders when they die. As the big television news networks took to the streets to get the commoner's view, the quotes ranged from "Good riddance" to the tearful accolade of a woman in Thatcher's home town of Grantham who said: "She was the perfect person."

The controversy that characterised her term as prime minister was also apparent in the headlines of this week's British and international media.

• Daily Mirror: "The woman who divided a nation";
• Daily Mail: "The woman who saved Britain";

• The Times: "The first lady";
• International Herald Tribune: "Conservative of enduring impact";

• Financial Times: "Thatcher: the great transformer";

• Socialist Worker: "Rejoice".

High up in most of the analyses is what many regard as her biggest mistake: her handling of the war against apartheid. She did not actually say the ANC was a "typical terrorist organisation" or that its ambition to rule was "cloud-cuckoo-land", but she certainly did personally and strongly resist sanctions against the apartheid regime, and she did befriend PW Botha when no one else would have anything to do with him.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with her good friend Ronald Reagan, Thatcher famously advocated "constructive engagement" with Pretoria, and in doing that she bought apartheid a little more time at the cost of lives lost and lives made miserable by a white government on the ropes.

Looking for parallels and for lessons from her life for this country, I see one significant quality she shared with Nelson Mandela - personal conviction. Mandela, in negotiations before 1994 and in his five years as president, was an instinctive politician, little given to self-doubt. He could look at a problem, even one as grave as the assassination of Chris Hani, mull it over in his own mind and then decide what needed to be done.

Once his mind was made up, the man was not for turning any more than Thatcher when she had set her course. In their very different ways, each of them used that conviction to break the social mould of the countries they inherited, and transform them from one state into something quite different. But the more comfortable comparison is perhaps with Thabo Mbeki.

The fiscal discipline Mbeki entrenched with the help of Trevor Manuel as his finance minister, his aversion to subsidies for capable people and industries and the denationalisation he launched as Mandela's deputy, and continued in his own term, all reflected the same fundamental economic assumptions that underpinned Thatcherism.

His grievous lapse of judgment over Zimbabwe mirrored hers over South Africa. Each saw the problem they faced as best resolved over the long term and through constructive engagement with the errant regime.

Citing the same defence that sanctions would most harm the people who needed to be helped, each resisted the mechanism that could most quickly have changed the game because they feared not being able to control events after the collapse of the regime in power. Each was convinced of their rightness in almost all circumstances and became so estranged from the grassroots of their electorates, they had to be thrown out of office when they tried to stay too long.

On a more trivial level, Thatcher and Mbeki were also workaholics while in office. I believe from associates that Mbeki usually slept fairly normally, but was certainly capable of several all-nighters in a row. Thatcher, I was told by one of her aides during a Nato conference in Brussels, slept no more than four hours, and often just three.

All these three demonstrated, as leaders, the courage to proclaim a conviction, explain it and act upon it. History will pick all of them apart to some degree, but at least their governments and nations knew what they were about. They knew what to support if they were for it and to oppose if against.

Now we have a leader who proudly confesses to having no political principles of his own, but only those of the collective that elected him.

We have an economy too uncertain to attract the investments it needs, an elite driven only by its own greed and a defence force doing who knows what or why.