“SHE’S a formidable lass, this Maggie, compact, efficient. She slips in and out of cars as if on ball-bearings. She manacles her hands together when she speaks. Totally neat. Condemning waffle in others (especially reporters), she herself uses waffle like a deadening sledgehammer. She never answered one question simply all day.”

Thus the Glasgow Herald’s esteemed writer, William Hunter, in February 1975, summarising much (though not all, of course) Scottish opinion of Margaret Thatcher, the new leader of the Conservative opposition, Thatcher went walkabout in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and in her first major speech since she replaced Ted Heath as leader she warned the nation that the Labour government’s aim was nothing less than the destruction of private enterprise.

In Edinburgh she had to abandon her walkabout plans when a 3,000-strong crowd turned up to see her at a shopping centre. In Glasgow, where she gave the speech at the City Hall, some 1,000 people crowded into George Square to see her (main image, far right),

Addressing a Tory rally, Thatcher assured the faithful that this would only be the first of many visits she would make to Scotland, “because it is crucial for Britain that the party’s fortunes should prosper and advance in Britain as a whole”.

Scotland, she said, was particularly important. The party’s number of Scottish MPs had been declining sharply since 1955: “unless we can turn the tide it will be difficult, if not impossible, to secure the return of a Conservative Government in Westminster with a working majority”. The establishment of a Scottish assembly had to be a priority but it had to be within the framework of preserving the unity of the United Kingdom.

Read more: Herald Diary

William Hunter noted that “otherwise sensible-looking Edinburgh matrons turned girlish about having laid hands on the person of the new Tory leader”. A Herald leading article conceded that Thatcher had a novelty value, she “created a genuine excitement in a way that few politicians can do nowadays”.

In September 1981, the same month as a major Cabinet reshuffle that purged many leading ‘Wets’, Thatcher came north, to Renfrew. She was greeted by 1,200 demonstrators, some of whom hurled eggs at her. Thatcher predicted that the worst of the then-recession was over. At one point she took a picture of the massed news photographers (right, top), and she gave Herald photographer Stuart Paterson a helping hand after he accidentally walked backwards into a slowly moving car in the Thatcher convoy.

In January 1983 Thatcher visited the Herald’s offices in Albion Street (right, bottom), to help mark the paper’s bicentenary. In a light-hearted speech at the Holiday Inn she said the paper had had an unfortunate start, as its first editor had been jailed for sedition. “I am sure the present editor will escape the fate of the first one”, she added, “but I shall be taking a particularly close look at the leader column just in case”.