She’s Ba-aack! : After a political winter of discontent, Margaret Thatcher thumps her foes in newly published memoirs and makes clear the Iron Lady will remain a strong voice in Britain.

THE PHOTO ON THE COVER OF THE GUARDIAN LEFT NO DOUBT. IT WAS a waist-down shot, a woman in a tailored tweed skirt and walking shoes, well-turned ankles and a purposeful stride. The caption read: “It has to be said that she comes alive when there is a whiff of gunfire in the air.” She was not otherwise identified, but there was the handbag--a heavy black-leather job in her right hand. That bag could only belong to Baroness Thatcher of Kestevan, the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, known simply as Maggie to millions of Britons and to millions more abroad as “The Iron Lady.”

Thatcher is honored, sort of, in the entry under handbagging in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. The lexicographers say it means “to treat ruthlessly or insensitively”--the political mugging in which Thatcher specialized during her 11 1/2 years as Britain’s prime minister. Cartoonists delighted in depicting opposition Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, mine union boss Arthur Scargill, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and other political targets cowering before her flailing handbag; in print it was variously described as “lethal,” “loaded,” and “steel-reinforced.” A Thatcher handbagging was a brusque, lacerating political assault that made enemies, particularly in her own Conservative Party, and led to her overthrow by parliamentary colleagues in November, 1990.

Following her crushing, bewildering defeat and abrupt departure from No. 10 Downing Street (she was out, handbag and baggage, the day after the Tories rejected her and chose John Major as prime minister), she attended farewell parties for her former aides, seeming listless and lost, as if the Iron Lady suffered from metal fatigue, an extraordinary turn of fortune for an enormously assertive world leader. For nearly three years she licked her wounds, snarling just enough to give pause to her enemies: Vengeful and enraged, she was the lioness in winter.

Her sometime speech writer, the playwright Sir Ronald Millar, saw her a year after she was ousted and recalls in his memoirs: “It was clear that the hurt of rejection had been intense. It wasn’t just the loss of a job she loved, it was as though someone had pushed her off the planet.”

“She was shattered,” remembers another intimate. “She literally didn’t know what to do with herself. She would see something going wrong and say, ‘Let’s do something’ before she realized she no longer had power to do something.”

She had never lost a general election; how could she be jettisoned by the very members of Parliament who owed her their positions? There was no simple answer. Her abrasive, domineering style had left wounds, and in her third term the longest-serving prime minister of this century faced other problems as well--a recession, an unpopular taxing scheme.

The roguish, wealthy Alan Clark, a former Thatcher minister, wrote bluntly in his recently published “Diaries”: “There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling and waiting for traces of blood to appear in the water.” And he told a reporter recently, “Consider the position of Mrs. Thatcher in 1990. She had become a political liability.”

Well, she’s back. Her own memoirs, “Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years,” published last month and serialized in the daily press, cast a cold shadow over Major’s already down-in-the-polls government. His closest advisers regard her as a loose political cannon capable of disrupting his policies. She retains an enthusiastic following among the Tory rank and file, indeed among conservatives everywhere, particularly in the United States and the former communist nations of Eastern Europe.

And she’s speaking out, not only in her memoirs, but also in television and radio appearances, in the daily press, in the House of Lords and among old friends. As she says of her political re-emergence, “I knew I had to build a new life, and it took time to shake down and see how we were going to do it.”

In recent weeks, Thatcher has visited the United States, the Far East, Russia, and Poland on behalf of her Thatcher Foundation, which she set up to promote Thatcherite principles of economic and political freedom. In Moscow and Warsaw--where she is widely popular for her support for the overthrow of communism--she was received like royalty. Her name in Eastern Europe is much more familiar than Major’s or, for that matter, any other world leader. Many remember that, in a sense, she discovered former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and, with President Ronald Reagan, set up an East-West triumvirate.

At home, with renewed confidence, she has been making the rounds with her husband, Sir Denis, to parties and theater openings like “Sunset Boulevard,” of which she later ruefully confided to a friend about the fictional fallen star Norma Desmond, “That’s me. That’s me.” The old mix of fire and ice is again on display. Though she turned 68 in October, she retains her energy and riveting look. After being raised to the peerage, she now sits in the House of Lords, blue eyes flashing above a deeper royal blue suit, her hair a warm honey color, her gestures hectoring the aged nobles.

Of her frenetic re-emergence, John O’Sullivan, a friend and editor of the right-wing National Review in New York, says, “I call it post-political Thatcher. She sort of enjoys it. She’s keen to keep alive her name in history.”

SHE RISES EARLY IN HER NEW HOME IN LONDON’S CHESTER SQUARE AND operates out of a cream-colored, four-story Georgian building in Belgravia, the headquarters of the Thatcher Foundation. Two policemen stand guard outside. There’s a signed photo of Ronald Reagan in the marble entrance hall and mementos of the 1982 Falklands War, in which she earned her spurs as a commander-in-chief. Her second-floor office, with fireplace, is tastefully decorated in restrained English-cozy. She has three secretaries, one of whom handles the 1,000 or so letters she gets each day. There were 9,000 letters alone after she urged the Western powers to intervene in Bosnia.

For the first time since she left Downing Street, her diary is full. And her days are dedicated to her writings, foundation business, her trips abroad (she commands up to $25,000 an appearance) and her controversial speeches. At the end of a telephone is a network of supporters who constitute the Thatcher court in exile, raising funds and giving her financial and moral support. Thatcherite members of Major’s Cabinet--Michael Portillo, Peter Lilley, John Redwood--discreetly lunch with her. Her twin children--Carol, a journalist, and Mark, a businessman--are in frequent touch.

Her chief personal mainstay continues to be Denis, who at 78 still plays a mean round of golf and famously likes a snifter or two. In her book, she is appreciative: “Being prime minister is a lonely job. It has to be; you cannot lead from the crowd. But with Denis there, I was never alone. What a man. What a husband. What a friend.”

Sir Denis’ humor is understated. The story is told that when he wanted his wife to resign in 1989, he asked her urbane adviser, Sir Gordon Reece, to sell her on the idea. Reece said, “Denis, I can’t tell her to go. I love her.” Denis replied, “Steady, Gordon, she’s my wife.”

The question often asked these days is, “What’s the lady up to?” Insiders say Lady Thatcher has no specific game plan or secret agenda. Some friends would like her to take on a major international job like secretary general of NATO or a major U.N. agency. But an adviser demurs: “I’m afraid she’s far too controversial with many governments to get appointed.”

Playwright Millar, her onetime confidant, recalls of her earlier performances in the House of Commons: “Margaret Thatcher evoked extreme feelings. To some she could do no right, to others no wrong. Indifference was not an option. She could stir almost physical hostility in normally rational people while she inspired deathless devotion in others.”

The publication of her memoirs has only underlined that fact. On the heels of her foundation travel, she has publicized her book with a whirlwind tour of Europe, America and Japan. Publication was preceded by heavy hype to accompany a print run of 330,000 914-page hardback copies at $37.50 apiece--and also for a four-part BBC television documentary on the Thatcher years. Publishing sources say that she received some $5.25 million from the book and newspaper serial rights.

Watching Thatcher on the author’s tour is like seeing her back on the campaign trail: Appearing in a smart powder-blue suit, she signed nearly 1,000 copies at London’s Harrod’s department store alone and then repeated the feat elsewhere; she gave speeches to standing ovations; she hit the provinces with the same fervor; she spent a long weekend in France plugging the book before the U.S. trip. Everywhere, she received fevered applause as if she had just won a national election--though she was seeking sales rather than votes.

ACERBIC, SHARP-TONGUED, EVEN nasty gibes at opponents have long been a staple of British politics. Even so, the country’s political establishment has been gripped by the characterizations in Thatcher’s book, her speeches, her TV series, and the reactions of friends and foes.

Not that she is mean to everyone. Her highest praise for a foreign leader is lavished on President Reagan, of whom she said, “I knew I was talking to someone who instinctively felt and thought as I did about policies, philosophy, human nature and high ideals.”

She is more ambivalent about President Bush: “One of the most decent, honest and patriotic Americans I have ever met.” But she adds: “I learned President Bush was sometimes exasperated by my habit of talking nonstop about issues. I had learned that I had to defer to him in conversation and not to stint the praise.” During the Gulf War, in a discussion over enforcing anti-Iraq sanctions, she said she told him “This is no time to go wobbly.”

President Carter comes in a poor third: He had, in her view, a loose grip of economics with “no large vision of America’s future.”

Lady Thatcher is critical of German Chancellor Kohl, French President Francois Mitterrand and European Commission President Jacques Delors because they did not accept her views on Europe. She is caustic about her domestic opponents. Of Labor’s Kinnock, she says, “In all his years as opposition leader, he never let me down. Right to the end, he struck every wrong note. His Commons performances were marred by verbosity, a failure to master facts and technical arguments and, above all, a lack of intellectual clarity. As opposition leader, he was out of his depth. As prime minister he would have been sunk.”

But Thatcher reserves some of her sharpest barbs for her own Cabinet members--all of whom, it should be said, she chose. “They thought the grocer’s daughter did not know how to get things done,” she says. And she also recalls her view: “Give me six strong men and true, and we’ll get through. I don’t think I ever had six at any one time, but I had enough.”

She seems to damn John Major with faint criticism, declaring that he doesn’t have good political instincts and suggesting he is not at ease “with large ideas and strategies.” As she recalls, “He was relatively untested, and his tendency to accept the conventional wisdom had given me pause for thought.” She also suggests Major was fainthearted about supporting her in the final leadership vote.

Unlike Major, who has tried to play the gentleman, the ex-Cabinet ministers have hit back. The former chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel Lawson, himself now in the House of Lords, is skewered in Thatcher’s memoirs. “The reason for this cock-and-bull story is clear,” he says. “Despite the fact that, in the gospel according to Thatcher, all decisions of any moment were taken by her, she had to find an explanation for her downfall for which she had no responsibility herself.”

Out of the storm of reactions to her book have come a few insights that she herself has declined to share. Her onetime ministers have revealed that the lady’s handbag was more than just a symbol or metaphor: It was a feared component of her armory, used at Cabinet meetings when she thought her colleagues were not entirely toeing her line. For example, her bluff-mannered Home Secretary Kenneth Baker calls the handbag her “secret weapon,” especially in dreaded handbag briefings. “If she felt things were not going her way, one of her techniques to regain control in Cabinet was to open her handbag and produce a briefing,” a position paper.

And affable Chris Patten, then environment secretary and now Hong Kong governor, agrees: “She’d open her handbag and bring out a sheet of paper heavily underlined in green ink.” She would quote from the briefing as if it were her secret oracle, or she would wave it about, not showing its contents to anyone else. Nobody seemed to know who produced the briefing papers, but Norman Tebbit, the dour hatchetman in her Cabinet, points out that there was a survival strategy: “The art of being a successful Cabinet minister was to have worked out in advance how you shot down the advice that was in her handbag. And if you did it well enough, the handbag wasn’t opened.”

To many on the receiving end, the Thatcher tongue was as wounding a weapon as anything in her handbag. The slender, brainy Malcolm Rifkind, now defense secretary, recalls a particularly abrupt dismissal when she told him, “I haven’t much time today. Only enough to explode and have my way.” Her Way, known to intimates as There Is No Alternative, was what Margaret Thatcher was all about. And, as the flurry of reminiscences--hers and others’--makes clear, that’s what brought her down.

Kenneth Baker, for instance, recalls her treatment of faithful Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe: “There was one awful time when Margaret was incredibly rude to Geoffrey Howe in a Cabinet meeting: She thought he hadn’t prepared some legislation in time. She wouldn’t let the matter drop; she was, well, nagging him, in the way only a woman can. Men would never speak to each other like that. They might use strong language, but never that. We all looked down at our papers, embarrassed. It was the last straw for Geoffrey, and he resigned that night.”

It was the ordinarily mild-mannered Howe’s resignation speech in the House of Commons, criticizing Thatcher’s style of leadership in devastating terms, that opened her political grave. Howe’s indictment reinforced the leadership challenge by senior Tory Member of Parliament Michael Heseltine--handsome, dynamic and popular with the voters--who had resigned as defense secretary after a Cabinet squabble.

According to the Conservative Party’s complex rules, the leader had to run for annual election by Tory members of Parliament and gain a majority plus an additional 15% more than the runner-up. Challenger Heseltine’s campaign was not at first taken seriously. On voting day, the prime minister was in Paris attending a summit conference. The first ballot went: Thatcher 204, Heseltine 152, 16 abstentions. Under the rules, she fell four votes short. Two votes switched would have put Thatcher over the top. So though millions of voters supported her, a second parliamentary party ballot was needed, this time with only a simple majority to win. As a furious Alan Clark, who discovered her campaign manager taking an office siesta on the day before the first ballot, says, “For want of a nail a kingdom was lost.”

In Paris, Thatcher announced she would contest a second ballot. (“The most bewildered man in Paris was Mikhail Gorbachev,” recalls the crusty Sir Bernard Ingham, her former press secretary. “He wondered: How did she ever get the chop?”) The next day, Thatcher returned to London to hold individual meetings with all Cabinet members. A few urged her to fight on, but more suggested she had been mortally wounded by the failure to win straight off. Therefore, she should bow out and not risk a humiliating second ballot defeat or win so narrowly that it would divide the party.

After painful hours of soul-searching, the prime minister decided to step down. Major, then chancellor of the exchequer, and the austere Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, both Thatcher loyalists, entered the lists to stop Heseltine. The gentlemanly Major won on the second ballot.

After considering her future, a traumatized Margaret Thatcher decided that she wouldn’t serve as an unhappy backbencher in the Commons, as had her acerbic, glowering predecessor, Ted Heath. Instead, she gave up her seat in the Commons and, at Major’s invitation, accepted a life peerage, becoming Baroness Thatcher in the House of Lords.

“She took the peerage feeling she would never get back in active politics,” observes Frank Johnson, a friend and the associate editor of the Sunday Telegraph. “She didn’t realize how soon Major would become so unpopular.”

And Bernard Ingham adds: “If she remained in the Commons, her every move would have been analyzed for hidden, ambitious meanings. This would have been divisive and earned the contempt of those who supported her. I think she has settled for being where she is.”

Still, Thatcher could hardly be blamed for toying with the memory that Winston Churchill was in his mid-60s, with several careers behind him, when he was called out of his wilderness years to lead the country through World War II. And William Gladstone was 84 in his final term as prime minister.

“In a great national crisis,” says John O’Sullivan, “she might just possibly go for it. But the crisis would have to be so severe that she wouldn’t wish it on the country.”

Asked recently whether she would consider renouncing her peerage to stand for election to the Commons, Lady Thatcher answered with a firm no. In another comment, she wasn’t quite so final: “I don’t expect to come back as prime minister, but why should one withhold one’s experience, or why should one be gagged?”

WITHIN THE RED-LEATHER CHAMBER OF LORDS, THE ATMOSPHERE IS genteel and polite, unlike the rowdy House of Commons where Thatcher reveled in the cut and thrust of debate, shouting down opponents. The baroness still finds herself speaking fervently--but with little reaction from their lordships, some of whom appear to be nodding off.

Nevertheless, Thatcher has fiercely attacked her successor’s support of the Maastricht treaty of European union and of nonintervention in Bosnia. The baroness opposes higher taxes the government may have to introduce, but she complains about proposed defense cuts. She also suggests that Major should do more to improve relations with Washington.

For his part, though he knows she bad-mouths him around town, Major keeps a stoic upper lip. But in a recent unguarded moment, he referred to her reign as “a golden age that never was.” And he adds, in a Major version of a put-down: “The world has moved on.”

In opposing Major’s policies, Thatcher has drawn increasing fire from her traditional supporters. It is one thing, they say, to express her convictions and quite another to undercut the prime minister for reasons that appear to stem from spite and jealousy.

“Appalling,” was the word one former aide used in describing her running challenge to Major’s pro-European policy, even though this adviser reveres Lady Thatcher as “possibly our greatest prime minister.” Many Tory ministers believe she should emulate her friend Reagan and ride quietly into the sunset. Otherwise, warns a former adviser, “she is reducing the prime minister’s ability to win another election.”

But she is not going gently into that good night: “I can influence things by the speeches I make,” she says. “Granny will always be there with her views. I don’t think you should be expected to conceal your views on any particular matter.”

This doesn’t sit well with many admirers. Sir John Junor, the crotchety former editor of the Sunday Express and a fervent ally whom she recommended for knighthood, said recently, “Isn’t it, to say the least, distasteful that she is now doing to John Major what the venomous, spiteful Ted Heath did to her? She was pushed out and is offended by that act of betrayal. She desperately wants to be back in power. She viewed John Major as a puppet. I have enormous respect for the woman, but her first loyalty should be to the country. She’s done a lot of damage to the party. It’s all very sad.”

Even Lady Thatcher apparently realizes she went over the top in what were widely construed as anti-Major declarations. After a spate of Thatcher vs. Major news stories, she allowed the novelist Jeffrey Archer, a dedicated Tory political operator and a friend of both parties, to leak to the media that whatever their differences, she fully backed Major and hoped he would remain prime minister and win the next election.

While all eyes were on her at the annual Conservative Party conference in October, she went further in her support, declaring that Major had returned to “the true path of conservatism” and insisted that “Thatcherism is alive and well.”

Even so, many observers believe that Thatcher has renewed her support for Major not so much from loyalty but because, if Major were deposed, his successor would probably be Kenneth Clarke, now home secretary and a man whom Thatcher thinks is not a dedicated Thatcherite.

However, with Maastricht behind him, Major is starting to come up in the polls. If Britain’s economy should improve, so will his approval rating--which could blunt Thatcher’s pointed jabs.

Speechwriter-playwright Millar, who has compared Thatcher’s downfall to Greek tragedy, suggests, “There are at least two, possibly more Margaret Thatchers. Part of the fascination of this remarkable woman is that one can never be entirely sure which is in the ascendant, and therefore how she will react to the latest political development.”

Political observers also remain fascinated with the riddles in the Thatcher political psyche: a leader who in office took Britain into the single European market and the European exchange-rate system but while out of office complained loudly that Britain should avoid the Maastricht union treaty; who while prime minister rejected national referendums as a form of legislation but in her fight against Maastricht pleaded heatedly in favor of one; who prided herself on making no public U-turns (“the lady’s not for turning”) but often accommodated herself quietly to changing position; who became an icon for feminists as a political leader (“She made the Tory party the natural home for feminists,” says writer Mary Kenny) yet admitted only one woman into her many Cabinets (Baroness Young, leader of the House of Lords, 1981-83); who chose Cabinet ministers and then scornfully dumped them; who wielded a serpent-sharp tongue to her political associates yet was kind and thoughtful to her household staff.

In assessing her role these days, Anthony Sampson, erudite author of “The Anatomy of Britain” and its various updates, comments, “She is quite a menace to John Major and the Conservative Party, not because she could come back but because she demoralizes Major and his Cabinet by being the almost mystical alternative. This keeps things unstable because it is the fantasy of a lot of Tories who want to go back to a dynamic role. What is intriguing is the degree of her irresponsibility, a very destructive element in the party. She appeals to ancestral voices, which Major can’t because he is not a romantic figure. Some conservatives think, ‘Why can’t he be like her?’ The fact that she made frightful mistakes in the last years is conveniently forgotten.”

To her supporters, though, she casts a different spell. “Whatever her difficulties and her faults,” says Norman Tebbit, the hard man of her Cabinet whom she sent to the Lords after a falling out, “everyone knew she was a great leader, a colossus among the politicians of her day, a powerhouse of ideas, which have electrified and energized political thought and action across the globe.”

Junor is somewhat skeptical of her finding a specific job worthy of her energy and talents. “There’s nothing she can do to her satisfaction. She has to be in there pitching. She sees the world going down the tubes. Gorbachev is gone. Reagan is retired. She sees nothing but impotence. She regards Clinton as a weak, uncertain character. She desperately wants to be back in power.”

At another level, Matthew Parris, the witty columnist for the Times of London and the Spectator and former Tory MP, says only half in jest: “She is becoming the spiritual head of a political religion. She is emerging as a cult leader.” The cult’s teaching: “We should do something, and always something bold. This is a doctrine likely to draw applause across a wide range of human concerns. Others will be left to say what we should do, but the cult will claim credit for the insight that something should be done. And why did she do none of these things herself? Ah, she was betrayed.” Like every cult, “hers will draw its strength from the human failure all around it, feeding on insecurity, anxiety and despair. Thatcherism is dead. Hail the dawn of Thatchianity.”

Whatever it’s called, Margaret Thatcher continues to search for a meaningful role on the world stage as she soldiers on from continent to continent, a modern-day Boadicea, the British warrior queen, with blue eyes blazing, chin aloft, preaching the true faith--and prepared to swing the handbag at anyone rash enough to question that faith.