Queen Elizabeth II leads mourners at Thatcher funeral

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II will lead mourners at next week’s funeral of Margaret Thatcher, the first time the monarch will have attended the ceremony of one of her former prime ministers since Winston Churchill died in 1965. Tributes from world leaders who hailed the role of the “Iron Lady” in bringing down communism kept flooding in as the British government announced that the funeral would be on Wednesday next week, April 17, in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. But “Maggie” remained as polarizing in death as she did in life, with violence erupting at street parties celebrating the demise of a figure who critics say destroyed millions of lives with her free-market economic policies. Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister and longest serving premier of the 20th century, died on Monday, April 8, aged 87 after suffering a stroke. She had suffered dementia for more than a decade.

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