The death of Margaret Thatcher, coming as it does amid a global economic crisis, is a moment to reflect on the value of leadership of an individual who is strong and principled. The principles and iron will are often written about; the political canniness was more elusive. It came into focus for us when an editorial writer with whom we were in harness in Europe during the 1980s encountered the prime minister at a reception. The writer, Peter Keresztes, introduced himself as being with the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Mrs. Thatcher spun on him and barked, “Stop using the words ‘supply-side.’ Stop using them. People don’t like it. They don’t like it.”

It’s not that Thatcher was opposed to supply-side measures, a fact that we wrote about in “The Secret Supply-Sider.” She brought down top marginal tax rates in Britain, an important step in reviving Britain’s — and Europe’s — dying economies. But however ardent her friendship with President Reagan (chronicled by our former foreign editor, Nicholas Wapshott, in “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, A Political Marriage”), the British conservative was not entirely in sync with the Reaganite ideology. According to a chart published by Bruce Bartlett in the New York Times, taxes as a percentage of GDP inched up in Britain during the Thatcher years. It was spending that inched downward.

That was revolutionary enough, and the combination of tax cuts at the top margin and her tight hand on spending ignited a boom that marked Britain apart from the continent. That Britain intended to stand apart was marked memorably by the prime minister in 1988 in one of her most famous speeches. It was delivered to the College of Europe at Bruges, Belgium, where Mrs. Thatcher declared: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” Her sightedness has rarely looked to be more far than it does now, is all we can say.

It was the Falklands War that is often depicted — as it was in the movie, “The Iron Lady” — as the turning point in Thatcher’s reign, the moment when it became apparent that her premiership was going to be triumphant. It was a magnificent moment. But the moment that we savor the most was her visit to Poland in the closing years of the communist tyranny there. This was when she demanded a meeting with the leader of the free trade union Solidarity. It is captured in a video on youtube.com, which we referred to in the editorial “Woman of the Year,” about one of Thatcher’s admirers, Sarah Palin, and her outreach to organized labor.

What an irony it was that when free labor determined to rise up against the communist camarilla, it was a free-market Tory whom the dockyard workers — proxy for all labor in the East Bloc — climbed out on their piers, prows, and cranes to cheer. This is a point to remember today. Thatcher may have been capable of compromise with the communists (she gave back to Communist China even that part of Hong Kong that Britain owned in perpetuity, and when the Wall Street Journal criticized her for it, she dressed down the editor in a memorable tirade), but she didn’t have many lapses. She had learned her values keeping shop with her parents. She understood the fact that there is no difference between political liberty and economic liberty. She grasped that they are but warp and woof in the fabric of freedom. How she is missed now as a new generation seeks to learn in a new time the lessons that she understood were timeless.