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Thatcher marks 80th birthday with big bash
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-14 09:44 Among the more than 600 guests invited to the party were many members of
Thatcher's Cabinets and two current candidates for the Conservative Party
leadership, David Davis and Liam Fox, Penrose said.
The other Tory contenders, front-runner David Cameron and Kenneth Clarke,
were not asked to go, prompting speculation that Thatcher was quietly taking
sides in the race to head the party. Penrose said Thatcher did not intend the
guest list as a comment on which candidate she preferred.
The queen shook Thatcher's hand on arrival.
Another guest, actress Joan Collins, said she adored Thatcher.
Chelsea Pensioners arrive for the 80th
birthday celebration of Britain's former prime minister Margaret Thatcher
at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in London October 13,
2005.[Reuters] | "She is the Iron Lady, and I want
to be just like that when I grow up," Collins said.
Caspar Weinberger, former President Ronald Reagan's defense secretary, was
the most prominent American invited.
Her twin children, Sir Mark and Carol Thatcher, were present. Mark Thatcher
pleaded guilty in South Africa last year to unwittingly helping to bankroll a
failed coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, in West Africa.
Also invited were composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber, writer Frederick Forsyth and
best-selling novelist and Tory peer Jeffrey Archer, who spent two years in jail
for perjury and obstructing justice.
Missing was former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — of whom Thatcher once
commented "we can do business together" — but he was scheduled to meet her
during a London visit next week.
Britain had faced high unemployment and labor unrest through the "Winter of
Discontent," in 1978 and '79, when strikes kept the dead from being buried and
the garbage from being collected.
With her forceful personality and bouffant hairdo,
Thatcher dominated British politics for much of the following decade.
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