Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the only woman to have filled that top spot, died peacefully Monday morning after a stroke, a family spokesman says.

LONDON — Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died Monday morning following a stroke, a spokesman for the family said.
"It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning," Lord Tim Bell said.
Britain's only woman prime minister, the tough, outspoken Thatcher, 87, led the Conservatives to three election victories, governing from 1979 to 1990, the longest continuous period in office by a British prime minister since the early 19th century.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday it was with great sadness he had learned of Thatcher's death, his predecessor as Conservative leader and prime minister.
"We have lost a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton," Cameron said in a statement shortly after her family announced her death. Cameron cut short a trip to Spain and France upon hearing the news
Queen Elizabeth also expressed sadness and said she would be sending a private message of sympathy to the family.
The queen has authorized a ceremonial funeral — a step short of a state funeral — complete with military honors, to be held at St. Paul's Cathedral, the British government announced.
Downing Street says the funeral will be attended by a "wide and diverse range of people," and the service will be followed by a private cremation. It did not provide further details on the timing of the service, saying only that the arrangement are "in line with the wishes" of Thatcher's family.
Known as the combative "Iron Lady," Thatcher infuriated European allies, found a fellow believer in Ronald Reagan and transformed her country by a ruthless dedication to free markets in 11 bruising years as prime minister
To her fervent admirers, battling Maggie was an icon, a national savior who ended Britain's post-World War II cycle of confrontation and decline — eclipsed as a 20th-century British leader only by Winston Churchill.
Her vehement critics, however, saw her as a bellicose figure at home and abroad, a destroyer of industries and, with it, a way of life.
She was a sharply divisive figure even within her Conservative Party, especially on the issue of European integration; the party declined into a bickering shambles after she fell from power.
Between 1979 and 1990, her governments sold a string of nationalized industries into private ownership, crushed the once-mighty labor unions, defeated Argentina in the Falkland Islands war and preached military readiness to the Western alliance.
"We have raised Britain in the respect of the world from what it was — broke, bankrupt, unwilling to defend itself properly," Thatcher declared in 1987. "We have, I think, transformed Britain."
Thatcher's years in power overlapped Reagan's two terms as president, and her support for the American leader and her agreement with his world view never wavered. It was a political union of opposites: Thatcher had none of Reagan's disarming charm, and he lacked her appetite for hard work and devotion to detail.
The grocer's daughter became Europe's first female prime minister in 1979, four years after the Conservative Party surprised itself by making her its leader. Typically, she jumped into the leadership race while more prominent male colleagues dithered, and then proved unstoppable.
Thatcher led the Tories to a landslide victory in 1979, followed by easy wins in 1983 and 1987.
She loved the jokes claiming she beat her all-male Cabinet ministers with her handbag, and reveled in being the "Iron Lady," a nickname coined by the Soviet press.
At home, she sold huge, loss-making state-owned companies, from Jaguar to national utilities to British Airways. Many became profitable.
For the employed majority of Britons, living standards rose dramatically, but the gap widened between the well-off and the poor.
The late Peter Jenkins, a leading liberal political commentator throughout the Thatcher years, once wrote that she had "changed the political map and put her country on its feet again."
"She did all this with ruthlessness and much injustice and at a high cost in human misery, but she did it," he said.