Daughter confirms Thatcher dementia

LONDON - The daughter of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said Britain's "Iron Lady" was suffering from dementia, the family's first public confirmation of what had been rumored in Britain for several years.

Thatcher's condition has deteriorated so much that she forgets that her husband, Denis Thatcher, died in 2003, her daughter writes in a memoir that is to be published next month and that was serialized over the weekend in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

"I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again," 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."

She said she first noticed her mother's failing memory over lunch in 2000, a decade after she left No. 10 Downing St. after leading Britain from 1979 to 1990. "Watching her struggle with her words and her memory, I couldn't believe it," writes Thatcher, a journalist and TV personality.

Margaret Thatcher, now 82, earned a reputation as a steely leader. She was a close friend and ally of President Ronald Reagan. Her Conservative Party tired of her stewardship and pressured her to resign in 1990. She remained an outspoken fixture in public life for years but largely retired from view after a series of small strokes in 2002.

She appears occasionally at parties and other public functions but seems far more frail than the blunt-spoken woman who ran Britain.

In

A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl: A Memoir,

Carol Thatcher writes that her mother still shows flashes of her old self, particularly about events from her time in office.

"Oh, how I wish I could do it all again," she quoted her mother as saying.