Paying homage to the Iron Lady. Iron lady, Iron Curtain, strike while the iron is hot: "Margaret Thatcher blocked Soviet aid for striking miners, files reveal". Had the iron will - the iron fist in the velvet glove - not been made of such stern stuff, the end of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall may have been delayed; is it too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe it may not have taken place at all.
"...newly released Downing Street documents have shed fresh light on the relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, exposing how Thatcher exerted intense diplomatic pressure on the future leader to successfully block a Soviet donation of much-needed cash to the strikers."...Had that donation taken place, apart from prolonging a country-damaging strike and weakening the UK government, the relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev would have been entirely different; despite the Maggie and Ronnie show, maybe Gorbachev wouldn't have been "someone [she] could do business with".
"...Thatcher's diplomatic offensive worked: no donation reached the British miners during their year-long strike. Gorbachev had embarked on his effort to reform the sclerotic Soviet state and concluded that the wiser option was to continue cultivating the British prime minister for the sake of relations between the two countries. Sacrificing the interests of the British miners was the price to be paid for not upsetting the so-called Iron Lady." [The Guardian]
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