Thatcher was the accidental midwife of peace in Northern Ireland – today’s partisan leaders, take note | Rory Carroll

25 years on from the Good Friday agreement, the Iron Lady's implacability and its unintended consequences are a lesson in humility

Seldom did a nickname feel so apt. Margaret Thatcher bent her foes - Tory sexists, trade union leaders, Argentine generals, Irish republicans, Soviet premiers - to her will. Armoured with a conviction she was right, she charged into one battle after another, slaying orthodoxy and precedents. What was this if not the work of an Iron Lady?

Thatcher unleashed a revolution in the 1980s that transformed Britain's political economy, jolted Europe's left-leaning consensus and emboldened her great ally Ronald Reagan. She widened the Great Man theory of history to include women, and fortified it. Epochal events bore her stamp.

Rory Carroll is the Guardian's Ireland correspondent and author of Killing Thatcher: the IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown (which in the US is titled There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA and Two Minutes That Changed History)