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Margaret Thatcher, in an image of 2010. GTRES

The war of the children of Margaret Thatcher: fought by the inheritance

After leaving Downing Street, she found herself alone and lost to the point of not being able to carry out the most basic household chores.

Margaret Thatcher was, in many aspects of her life, a woman trapped inside a dichotomy that baffled everyone around her. Able to win the support of the popular classes while defending economic power, the Iron Lady lived a life of continuous contrasts that led her from being the most powerful woman in the world to consume herself in the solitude of dementia that eaten her until his death in 2013. Now, with the publication of the third part of his mammoth biography , new details emerge about one of the most fascinating characters of the late twentieth century.

Margaret Thatcher, Herself Alone , of Charles Moore, former director of the British newspaper The Telegraph , presents the leader since 1987, when she won her third consecutive general elections , until her last days, where stories about the ravages they had made in it the degenerative diseases he suffered. Thatcher, who a year before leaving Downing Street already showed signs of being "very, very tired" according to the words of her own husband, Denis - who escaped to South Africa for two months and rumored that divorce was raised after have several extramarital affairs - supposedly left the Government for his increasingly tired mind, which began to play tricks on him.

It was because of that or because of a conspiracy within the Conservative Party, at which point the different versions do not rule out that both are valid, the truth is that the former Tory leader found herself outside the residence where she had lived the longest in all Your adult life. The Iron Lady , who according to this new biography would have been, for example, one of the driving forces behind Nelson Mandela's liberation , defining apartheid as "wrong, immoral and contrary to human dignity," found herself alone and lost until extreme of not being able to carry out the most basic household chores .

One of the stories that Moore tells in his book tells how Thatcher, shortly after leaving Downing Street, phoned Charles Powell, his former private assistant, on a Saturday morning to complain that the hot water was not working . He, who suggested that he call a plumber from the yellow pages, to which she replied that he did not know what they were, had to finally go to get by.

Margaret Thatcher, along with her husband, Denis, and their children, Mark and Carol, in 1976.EM

The former conservative leader did not have a single penny in the bank, had not left a message on an answering machine in her life and did not even understand how the new remote controls were used for the television. All of this further agitated a self-contradictory character that led her, for example, to show extraordinary respect for the ordinary members of her staff, such as her assistants or chauffeurs, while being hard and relentless with her political enemies.

That complicated personality led her to the fact that the relationship with her children was not good, and only her son Mark, who did not end well, visited her from time to time at her home in Dulwich, where she ended up isolated . Accompanied almost exclusively by the comforting feeling of knowing what would happen to History as one of the political personalities of the century, Thatcher was an extremely difficult woman to content.

Friends, as such, did not have many in their new stage, but some of them tell how complicated it was to entertain a woman without hobbies , who did not practice any sport and did not have a good family situation. Those who hosted her say in Moore's biography that they felt as if they were receiving a royalty because they did not know what to do with it and were forced to be constantly looking for activities to occupy their time.

In the twilight of his life, the former prime minister liked, according to a person in his circle, to visit the residence of one of his admirers to contemplate one of his paintings, The Frederick Herring's The Leamington Hunt . With him, Thatcher, one of the personalities that has most influenced an entire generation of politicians in the United Kingdom and beyond its borders, exercised his brain by counting the dogs that appeared on the hunting scene as one of his last acts of resistance against dementia that little by little I end up devouring.

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