Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!

Born Margaret Hilda

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Roberts in 1925, the grocer’s daughter grew up in Gr Grantham, Lincs, in a house with an outside loo. At nine, when she won a poetry prize at school, a teacher told her she was lucky. Margaret replied: “I deserved it.”

After studying chemistry at Oxford, she worked on putting air into ice cream to make it soft.

She met divorcee Denis Thatcher at a paint trade function. They married in 1951, although she called him “not very attractive”.

AAbe 4 elected After re-training as a Tory as MP a barrister she was first in 1959. 19 But Maggie said: “There will not be a woman prime minister in my life lifetime.”

As Secretary of Education she was branded “Thatcher, the m milk snatcher!” after ending free milk for school kids.

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While in Number 10 she still cooked for Denis and her family.

Often surviving on four hours’ sleep a night, her favourite tipple was whisky.

Mrs Thatcher is credited with the emergence of the phrase ““to handbag” someone.

FIRST AMONG EQUALS: Mrs T in Downing St. Left, TV puppet. Right, The Crown

TV critic Clive James described her voice as like “a cat sliding down a blackboard,” so Thatcher had lessons t to l lower it from actor Sir Laurence Olivier’s voice coach.

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She was portrayed as a bloke on Spitting Image, but diarist Alan Clark found her ankles “very attractive”.

Her son Mark went missing on the Paris-Dakar rally, while twin Carol won I’m A Celebrity in 2005.

I In the Falkland Islands t they still mark Margaret T Thatcher Day on January 10, 0 the date of her 1983 visit after the previous year’s war.

In 1984 she narrowly avoided death when an IRA bomb exploded inside the Brighton Grand Hotel during the Tory party conference.