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LONDON - The Iron Lady is a mere shadow of her former self. Since the death of Denis, her husband of 52 years, on June 26, the physical and mental powers that Lady Margaret Thatcher wielded during her 11 years as Britain's prime minister have all but vanished. 'She has been abandoned and forgotten, with few close friends to share her old age,' according to TV producer Linda McDougall, who has known Mrs Thatcher, now 78, for 30 years.

LONDON -- Margaret Thatcher was Britain's best prime minister since Winston Churchill and her resignation spelled disaster for the Conservative party, her late husband said in an interview broadcast yesterday. In a documentary recorded before his death June 26, Sir Denis Thatcher also said his wife's successor, John Major, had been a "ghastly prime minister." "The whole situation in the Conservative party today springs from that night, when they dismissed the best prime minister the country has had since Churchill," he added, in the Channel 4 television program Married to Maggie. Margaret Thatcher was Britain's first female PM and led...

Maggie's final farewell to Denis by ROBERT HARDMAN, Daily Mail 4th July 2003 ever had she looked so vulnerable, so mortal. But even at this, her saddest hour, Lady Thatcher summoned all her reserves of composure to bid a fine farewell yesterday to the man she called the "golden thread" running through her extraordinary life. This was not a tribute to Sir Denis the consort, or Sir Denis the long- suffering political appendage with a gin in his hand (remarkably, the wake was fuelled by nothing stronger than tea). This was a very proper valediction to Sir Denis the father,...

Obituary: Sir Denis Thatcher Denis Thatcher's motto: "Always present, never there" Often seen but rarely heard, Denis Thatcher was a loyal supporter, and occasionally a shrewd adviser, to the woman he called "the Boss".As Margaret Thatcher confessed in 1985, on the 10th anniversary of becoming leader of the Conservative Party, "I couldn't have done it without Denis." He met the young Margaret Roberts when she was the Tory parliamentary candidate for Dartford in 1951. They married the same year. His money, made in the oil business, helped sustain her career and twins Mark and Carol were born two years...

Businessman who gave staunch support as prime ministerial consort, but avoided conflicts of interest with admirable propriety Denis Thatcher was called on to play a role that no Englishman had ever had to play before, and he played it with style, good humour and an unselfish sense of duty that contributed substantially to the achievements of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. It was a role not easy to put in words: it is hard enough to define the importance of the wives of famous men, and the phrases sound even more stilted when the roles are reversed — phrases such...

A moment of silence, please, for the man who knew perfectly well what the correct interpretation of the role of First Lady was and executed it flawlessly - in pants. Denis Thatcher died yesterday. He became an iconic figure in Britain, had a brilliant parody of his letters published regularly in London's "Private Eye," and was known to be sometimes as colorful in his real life as in his satirists' imagination: During a visit to a village outside Delhi, the locals forced him to wear a vast pink turban. As he walked away, his headgear wobbling like a huge jelly,...

The Associated Press LONDON June 26 — Sir Denis Thatcher, the husband of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, died Thursday at the age of 88, a spokesman for the family said.Thatcher died at London's Lister Hospital, the spokesman said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He underwent coronary bypass surgery in January and had been hospitalized for several weeks. Denis Thatcher married the former Margaret Roberts, 10 years his junior, in 1951, and they had two children.A tall, well-dressed and wealthy man who was always one step behind his famous wife, Thatcher learned to turn the self-effacing remark into a...