MAIL ONLINE: Anyone who can yield great power easily and painlessly is probably ill suited to exercise it. So it was with Margaret Thatcher. Leaving Downing Street in 1990, ousted by her own colleagues, was more than a wrench for her. It was a personal catastrophe.
She had driven herself so hard and excluded so much else from her life that by then all she was made for was to lead. Suddenly she found herself on the political scrap-heap — and irreversibly so.
Some around her thought of a possible return to power. But she never did, and, contrary to whispered allegations, she always discouraged such imaginings. She knew she was out for good.
The transition to private life was stressful for her, and immediately after her departure from No. 10, her mood was black. She was prone to tears, she was difficult and ill-tempered, sometimes she seemed unhinged. She was almost certainly clinically depressed. Perhaps she should have taken some medication, but she did not.
It was a condition not helped by her belief that her successor, John Major, was betraying everything she stood for. She disliked what she perceived as his lack of principle, his pursuit of consensus, his wooing of interest groups and his chippiness. She was tortured by his constant attempts to distance himself from her.
Suddenly deprived of staff, she had to make her own phone calls, and it emerged that she had no idea how to use a push-button telephone. She had to get advice from her police minders to do so.
More difficulties arose with finding somewhere suitable to live. The new house she had bought in Dulwich, South-East London, was too far out of town, and so the Thatchers borrowed a flat in Eaton Square, Belgravia.
It was suitably grand and central but dark, and her husband Denis in particular disliked its gloom. Mrs Thatcher, sitting beneath a painting of Queen Isabella of Spain, hosted sometimes lachrymose and slightly mad lunches there, while her friends and advisers around the table lamented bitterly the turn of events.
It is to this time in her life that can be traced another problem — her drinking. Contrary to legend, Mrs Thatcher never drank heavily in office.
She enjoyed relaxing with a whisky and soda (no ice), her favourite drink because it was less fattening than gin and tonic. But she was never tempted to over-indulge because she always had a low threshold for alcohol, and even the mildest inebriation would have dulled her mind during the long hours she worked on her papers.
But, out of office, the demands on her were far less — and, like many unhappy people, she hoped a drink would make life bearable. Read on and comment » | Robin Harris | Friday, April 12, 2013
