Maggie Thatcher and Prime Minister Theresa May both come from humble beginnings. Photos / Getty Images, AP
Opinion
The first, Maggie Thatcher, was a grocer's daughter with a very posh accent, Britain's new, steely Prime Minister Theresa May's a vicar's daughter, so they both came from relatively humble beginnings.
The only real similarity between Britain's two female Prime Ministers though, is their husbands.
Denis Thatcher was forever at
his wife's side, although few ever heard him speak.
The new Prime Ministerial consort Philip May looks strikingly similar to Denis Thatcher and both men had a long career in finance.
Our Prime Minister of the day Rob Muldoon idolised his British counterpart, even once offering to send a frigate to the Indian Ocean to stand guard during Maggie's Falklands War.
John Key's relationship with Theresa May isn't as cosy.
He met her in her role as Home Secretary last year and tried to get a better deal for the sixty three thousand kiwis living in Britain but came away empty handed.
Meeting Maggie Thatcher once at a Commonwealth meeting in Melbourne in 1981 was a most unpleasant experience.
Questioning her about the tenth death in prison of an IRA hunger striker a few months earlier, she raised her eyes towards the ceiling, sniffed and imperiously dismissed me with the flick of her gloved hand as a young man, and declared she wasn't going to be trapped into answering questions, and stormed off.
Let's hope Theresa May's a little more agreeable, even if she will be drinking from a poisonous chalice, toasting the United Kingdom's newly declared independence.
She's appointed the undiplomatic Brexiter Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary to do the spade work with the European Union which he's likened to an Adolf Hitler project, which should get him off to a good start.
