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Sir [Ronald Millar] was a well known playwright and Hollywood scriptwriter before becoming Tory Premier Edward Heath's speechwriter, then [THATCHER]'s when she became party leader.

\"Ronnie got on fantastically well with her,\" said Sir Tim Bell, then [Margaret Thatcher]'s image adviser. \"He wasn't thought to be a Heathite. He was a professional entertainer who happened to be a Conservative. A huge number of people would contribute to her speeches. His job was to set the style and tone, and make it appeal to an audience. \"He would show her a draft, she would invariably say 'I can't do this, Ronnie. I don't understand it. It's rubbish.' She would change everything, and then go pretty much back to what he had written.\" Thatcher had a legendary inability to understand the best lines fed to her by [Ronald Millar] and others. He once wanted her to make a biblical joke - \"And I say to Moses 'Keep taking the tablets'.\" She told him crossly that people did not say \"tablets\", they said \"pills\".

\"Although our careers went in different directions for many years, we always kept in touch\" said Ronald Millar about his business partner Jonathan Guthrie. It was this duo which launched Kirkcaldy- based MGT to take advantage of the booming demand for call centre services. It was after qualifying as accountants that their careers diverged. Millar moved into the venture capital industry and property development while Guthrie, after a spell abroad, joined BSkyB in the early days of satellite broadcasting. As Guthrie recalled, by 1997 both had decided that they wanted to strike out on their own. \"I wanted to do my own thing after spending seven years helping to manage Sky's subscriber management services. The property company Ronald was with had been floated and he also wanted to do something on his own.\" In October, 1997, Millar and Guthrie pitched their business plan to the venture capital industry looking for #4m. Millar recalled the response. \"It was terrible. Nobody was interested. The main problem was that we were a start-up company and those were not attractive at the time.\"

Ronald Millar, who has died aged 78, was a traditional playwright with a flair for by-passing theatrical fashion with lucky rather than premeditated career moves. Just as his tone as a popular playwright became unfashionable he found a new and effective voice in party politics as scriptwriter and phra His most remembered phrase is likely to be her \"U turn if you like; the lady's not for turning\" for the 1980 party conference. It was a play on words from the title of Christopher Fry's largely forgotten play The Lady's Not For Burning which Millar had hit on almost casually and Thatcher had accepted without enthusiasm. \"Ronnification\" became party slang for chopping up speeches which might otherwise have been aridly ineffective into short pithy sentences and putting an arresting human gloss on them. In the Thatcher era at least, \"Ronnie\" became almost one of the family. A large emollient man with his own sense of honour, Millar never took a penny for his speechwriting, nor did he join the party. \"I have an instinctive dislike of labels and have always found being pinned down claustrophobic,\" he maintained.

Sir Ronald Millar, the playwright who stamped Margaret Thatcher's character on the mind of the nation by handing her the line \"the lady's not for turning\", died yesterday in London, aged 77. Sir Ronald wrote Hollywood films and West End plays before becoming a speech writer at the age of 50. Although he wrote for Sir Edward Heath and John Major, he is best known for offering up the words which would come to symbolise the Thatcherite revolution.

Sir Ronald Millar died a couple of weeks ago. He wrote movies for Hollywood, the book and lyrics of Robert And Elizabeth, for which Percy Grainger supplied the music, and the 1970 play, Abelard And Heloise, which brought Diana Rigg in the buff to the West End stage and delight to the theatregoing public. Nevertheless, as far as the obituaries were concerned, his crowning achievement was coming up with Margaret Thatcher's line, `The lady's not for turning.' You see? You spend all your life slave to the muse, writing plays, books and movies, but unless you can come up with a memorable soundbite, you're nobody. I've been trying for years, working as a freelance soundbite writer, sending them, unsolicited, to appropriate public figures in the quest for honour and glory. And, three times, I've come that close to getting them used. Oddly enough, my first near miss was with Millar's line. The allusion is, of course, to the title of Christopher Fry's play, The Lady's Not For Burning, which, being in verse, was, in 1948, considered by those whose knowledge of theatre didn't run much beyond the skilful ordering of interval drinks to be at the cutting edge of dramatic innovation.

Sir [Ronald Millar], playwright and speech writer; born November 12, 1919, died April 16, 1998 Sir Ronald Millar, who came up with Mrs [Margaret Thatcher]'s famous line \"The lady's not for turning,\" was a playwright and screenwriter who came into political speech-writing more or less by accident. A recording of the broadcast was played to Mrs Thatcher after she became party leader and, without knowing that it originally had displaced a broadcast of her own, she liked it enough to want to use the Millar talents. The first speech he wrote for her contained the Abraham Lincoln quote \"you cannot help the poor by destroying the rich\", and when he handed it to her she opened her handbag and showed him that she always carried the quote around with her. From that moment they worked together, though Millar was said to take no money either from Thatcher or the party, and he admitted to finding it \"a lot easier to write for her when we were in opposition and there was no Civil Service machine to worry about\".

Sir [Ronald Millar], who was a distinguished playwright and screenwriter before beginning his political writing career at the age of 50, worked as a speech writer for Edward Heath for four years before going on to work for Margaret Thatcher when she became Tory leader in 1975. It was Sir Ronald who suggested to Thatcher that she should make her dramatic recital of the words attributed to St Francis of Assisi (\"Where there is despair, let us bring hope \") before she entered No 10 on the day in 1979 when she became Prime Minister, and he is credited with being of enormous support to her during the miners' strike and the Falklands War.

SIR RONALD MILLAR, Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter for 16 years, died today at the age of 78.

This strikes me as being [Howard Brenton]'s dramatic strength. Throughout his career, he has always been fascinated by passionate extremists from John Wesley to Lambert le Roux in Pravda, to the New Testament Paul. And here, for all his endorsement of Abelard's belief in human conscience, there is far more fire and urgency in [Bernard]'s trust in divine revelation. It isn't simply a case of giving the devil the best tunes. Brenton lends the Cistercian a missionary zeal that carries echoes of early political militants. Brenton's head may be with [Peter Abelard] but his heart is secretly with Bernard.