The last time I was in the same room as Margaret Thatcher, several hundred Japanese businessmen were there, too.

It was Tokyo, September 1989, the high noon of Japan's economic power. World leaders were passing through every week to pay homage to the yen, but prime minister Thatcher was different. When she strode in to the Keidanren hall (Japan’s CBI), sober ranks of dark-suited grey-haired men erupted like teenagers at a pop idol concert.

The Meryl Streep biopic The Iron Lady has been hammered for being politics-light and rose-tinting history. But one thing it gets absolutely right is the aura that surrounded the twentieth century’s most controversial prime minister at the height of her powers. And her determination to tackle what she saw as restrictive practices; including those at the receiving end of what was to prove her last handbagging, of the legal profession.

Unsurprisingly, The Iron Lady doesn’t cover the protracted run-up to the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 (there’s not even space for a mention in Thatcher’s 900-page memoir The Downing Street Years). But, at a time when a Conservative-led government is embroiled in controversy over legal reform - and the sector is going through its own big bang revolution - it seems appropriate to take a trip down memory lane.

The 1990 reforms, which granted rights of audience to solicitors, introduced the principle of no win, no fee to English law and created the office of Legal Services Ombudsman, came hard on the heels of big bang in the City and Thatcher’s 1987 election victory.

Thatcher’s long-serving chancellor, Nigel Lawson, recalled in his memoirs: ‘I had always felt that restrictive practices in the legal profession were a particularly ripe subject for critical scrutiny, not least because no previous government had ever dared touch the subject.’

With the prime minister’s blessing, the reforms made their debut in three green papers published in January 1989 by the Lord Chancellor, Lord McKay. Of the ensuing row, Lawson says: ‘The Bar Council and the judges bitterly opposed extending the right of audience and portrayed the other proposals as an affront to the cherished principle of professional self-regulation.’ As for the Law Society, its welcome was ‘strangely muted’. Lawson also found ‘extraordinary’ the widespread opposition to the green paper’s proposals for adopting the Scottish system of no win, no fee.

Nonetheless, after a parliamentary mauling - especially over the question of the ‘cab rank’ rule - at least some of the reforms reached the statute book. Lawson sums up: ‘I was proud to be a member of the first government that had ever been radical enough to wish to take on the legal establishment in the interest of the people, and brave enough to do so.’

As far as I know, Thatcher’s own verdict of the reforms is not on record. It is possible that, by 1990, her interests were fully occupied elsewhere - on Europe, local government finance, and NHS reform, which she had entrusted to her combative health secretary, one Kenneth Clarke.

But the 1990 handbagging of the bar is notable in one respect: Thatcher was taking on her own. The young iron lady passed her bar exam in 1953, and practised, on and off, at the tax bar for five years. In his impeccably balanced 1990 biography, the late Hugo Young says this legal training manifested itself in two ways in the iron lady’s political career. One was in ‘her interest in figuring’, which, ‘combined with a rare capacity to follow the thread of the most intricate financial arguments, grew richly over time and, as she has acknowledged, was much assisted by the conundrums she was obliged to master at the tax bar.’

But the practical side was of less consequence than the philosophical, Young says. Thatcher told a BBC interview in 1974: ‘I don’t think it is generally realised how much freedom and democracy owes to the rule of law, and I sometimes wonder now if that is one of the things which is changing.’

An unerring eye for detail and commitment to the rule of law. I didn’t join the cheering back in 1989, but I can’t help feeling nostalgic for those two Thatcherite qualities now.

Michael Cross is Gazette news editor