Thatcher’s dementia revealed

Margaret Thatcher's struggle with dementia has been revealed in a memoir by her daughter. Carol Thatcher tells how the former prime minister has been suffering from dementia for at least seven years. Baroness Thatcher, 82, first began to show signs of dementia in 2000, and could not remember that her husband Denis had died in 2003, according to the book A Swim-on Part in the Goldfish Bowl: A Memoir.

Carol Thatcher writes: “Every time it finally sank in that she had lost her husband of more than 50 years, she’d look at me sadly and say ‘Oh’, as I struggled to compose myself. ‘Were we all there?’ she’d ask softly.”

The first signs came when her mother was 75, when she appeared to be confused about the Bosnian and Falklands conflicts. "I almost fell off my chair. Watching her struggle with her words and her memory, I couldn’t believe it. I had always thought of her as ageless, timeless and 100 per cent cast-iron damage-proof. The contrast was all the more striking because she’d always had a memory like a website."