Mrs T could be face of £50 note...for services to ice cream

SHE is best known as Britain’s first female prime minister.

But Margaret Thatcher could feature on the new plastic £50 note to celebrate her brief career as a scientist.

Baroness Thatcher, who died in 2013, has been nominated following an appeal for suggestions by the Bank of England.

Nominees must be dead and be linked with British scientific achievement. Mrs Thatcher was a food scientist for J Lyons and Co from 1949 to 1951 before entering politics. She worked on ice cream and was rumoured to have helped develop Mr Whippy, although that is probably a myth.

The favourite to be selected as the face of the new £50 is Professor Stephen Hawking, who died in March. The expert on black holes, whose battle with motor neurone disease was portrayed in the film The Theory Of Everything, is 2/7 with bookmakers.

Computer scientist Alan Turing, the war-time codebreaker and computing pioneer who inspired the film The Imitation Game, is second favourite at 5/1. Others in the running include Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, Nobel Prize-winner Professor Dorothy Hodgkin, who used X-ray techniques to find the drug’s atomic structure, Victorian computer pioneer Ada Lovelace and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, who was instrumental in the discovery of the structure of DNA.

Among the 816 names being considered – around 200 of them women – are several unexpected nominations including Peter Rabbit author Beatrix Potter, who was a keen botanist, and weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, who died in 2003 shortly after he was exposed as the source of a BBC report that claimed Tony Blair’s government had ‘sexed up’ a dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

The Bank of England says 174,112 people have so far nominated a candidate to appear on the £50 note. December 14 is the deadline for entries.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney announced the new note earlier this year and said it would celebrate British science.

The polymer £50 will replace the current paper note – which features industrial revolution pioneers Matthew Boulton and James Watt – some time after 2020, when the new polymer £20 note featuring the artist JMW Turner is due to be released.