Margaret Thatcher’s dementia left her thinking she was still Prime Minister — years after resignation
MARGARET Thatcher’s dementia left her believing she was Prime Minister years after she resigned.
Her former press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham said she mistook his visits for their old troubleshooting meetings.
Sir Bernard said: “When she, poor lass, acquired dementia it was as though nothing had changed from Number 10.
“When I went to see her she’d say, ‘Will you have a coffee and sit down’. Then she looks at me expectantly, ‘What’s the problem?’
Then she’d say, ‘Why have we got into this mess? But, more importantly, what are we going to do about it?’”
Sir Bernard tells in the final episode of BBC2 documentary Thatcher: A Very British Revolution, screened on Monday how he always plucked a random “problem” from the day’s newspapers to deliberate.
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He said: “We discussed this problem at least six times in the hour because she’d forgotten.
"It would have been funny if it weren’t tragic.”
The documentary also recalls Lady Thatcher weeping when she told her Cabinet she was resigning in 1990. She died in 2013, aged 87.
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