Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher carried a striking paradox in her chart. Her Sun shone in Libra, Venus's sign of the Scale, the archetype that shines by weighing, judging and seeing both sides of the coin. The grocer's daughter trained as a chemist and then as a barrister, professions of exact balance and argument, before entering the arena of law-making itself. That Sun sat in her eleventh house, the house of the tribe, yet the Sun there is no team player and will not share its throne: she led her party, and her country, in a manner that was unmistakably her own.

Her Moon lived in Leo in the ninth house, king and queen at once, a proud, dramatic psyche fed by conviction, tradition and higher belief. Here was a woman whose emotional bedrock was her own certainty, unyielding, theatrical in Parliament, never quite able to bear being contradicted.

With Scorpio rising, the phoenix mask of all-or-nothing survival, she earned the name Iron Lady. First female Prime Minister, elected in 1979 and thrice victorious, she reshaped Britain through privatisation and deregulation, faced down the miners and the IRA, and fell in 1990. She died in 2013, aged eighty-seven, a permanently polarising figure.