April 8th, 2013
I was lying in bed at the Ritz. Another stroke had left me with a splitting headache. My sight was blurred and my breathing was labored. “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.” But I knew disease is arbitrary. However, by no means had I lost. I was still alive.
It is a long time that I lived, too long for a politician, and too long for a woman. A politician always gets reproached and scorned when she has stayed in the prime minister’s office for too long and done too much. “I've got a woman's ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it,” I always told myself. It was my job to do the work, but no one’s job to agree with me. “It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbor; life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.”
I’d done so much work: the economy, the enemies of democracy, the Falklands war; and though I had done so much, much remained to be done. But I had to leave. I planned my work and executed my plans, but I would soon be unable. I loved arguments, and I loved debate; I would soon have no one with whom to argue. Denis and Reagan had both left me, and my girls would never return. It was clearly my time to go.
May the sun never set on the British Empire.
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