Jilly Cooper talks to … MARGARET THATCHER

The Fuchsias in Mrs Thatcher's front garden in Chelsea drooped patriotically from lack of water. The squawk of home-going Sloane Rangers mingled with the distant rumble of Kings Road traffic. Across the street a policeman sweated unobtrusively in the shade.

A discreetly pretty secretary showed me into the dining room, apologising for non-existent mess. They were all very busy getting ready for Mrs. Thatcher's Australian tour. “You can't overbrief Mrs Thatcher.” she went on. “she likes to be prepared for everything.”

A languid young man, who turned out to be Mrs Thatcher's son. Mark. drifted in to ask if I'd like a drink. The only white wine they had, he said, was South African and unchilled. And suddenly in swept Mrs Thatcher herself in a little black dress, crying how stuffy it was and why hadn't someone opened a window. On her tour, she said, she would have to make seven major speeches, followed a week after she got back by the Tory Party conference. It was essential not to repeat oneself. “The shortest currency in the world, y'know, is the currency of new ideas.”

Passing two nude drawings on the stairs, we went up to the drawingroom, which was elegant, and typically Chelsea, with eau de nil walls, and Peter Jones covers of foliage and birds of paradise, the coral picked out in plumped-up scatter cushions. Cabinets, filled with Mrs Thatcher's favourite porcelain, stood on such slender thoroughbred legs one expected them any minute to canter across the lush green carpet.

I was unprepared for her prettiness. Old - fashioned parasol-cherished looks, an apple - blossom complexion, pearly white arms emphasised by the black dress, long beautiful legs set off by expensive black shoes, the dust under the buckles indicating a summer spent in the cupboard. She is 50.

I was even more surprised by how much I liked her. I had imagined a chilly Debenham's shopping lady, a sort of Fairy Snow Queen. In fact she is friendly, amazingly unconceited and touchingly insecure about her image.

“People complain I'm too immaculate to get any work done, but look, look,” she said eagerly, “there's ink on my hands and my hair's a terrible mess.”

She has changed since she took over the leadership. The Cartland perm has gone, her hair is soft and wings over her ears in a traditionally Tory, Macmillanish way. The voice has changed too, deeper, richer and deliberate, flowing on without an ah or um like Carnation milk pouring out of a tin. Not a trace of the Lincolnshire accent of her childhood remains.

Her early years should have been written by Arnold Bennett - living over a grocer's shop with no bathroom, the Draconian upbringing, serving behind the counter during the holidays, the ambitious self-made father who left school at 12 and rose to be Mayor of Grantham. The shop stayed open late on Saturday, often her father's friends dropped in and talked politics late into the night. One can imagine Margaret, a plump, serious adolescent, drinking it all in.

Was she happy as a child? “We didn't take happiness as an objective. We did a lot. My parents worked hard, our house was always spotless. Cleanliness and hard work were very close to Godliness.”

She leaned forward clasping her hands, revealing for a second the Arctic gleam of a very white bra. “My Alfred Robertsfather was a highly self-educated man, if he'd been alive today I could have sat down and discussed fixed and floating rates with him.”

Her son Mark looked in and said he was off to play squash. “Will you be back for dinner, dear?” He said he didn't know.

More noises off. “Come up, Carol ThatcherCarol, dear,” called Mrs Thatcher, and her discreetly pretty daughter popped her head round the door and said she was going out too and didn't know if she'd be in for supper either.

“Y'see they come and go as they like,” said Mrs Thatcher, with a rather plaintive smile.

By living in Chelsea, she has re-created the cosy shopping complex of her childhood. “It's so convenient, everything you need round the corner, Jaegers, the newsagent. And at the end of the road there's Peter Jones,” she added with the reverent warmth our cats might reserve for the local fish shop.

Her career must have been made easier by being married to a man successful in his own right. Before retiring last year, Denis Thatcher was earning about £15,000 a year. How did they first meet?

“In the political round,” said Mrs Thatcher, “I had a meeting in Dartford, it was going to end later than the last train, a lift was laid on, the driver was Denis ThatcherDenis.”

“How romantic,” I said, “was it love at first sight?”

“It was not,” said Mrs Thatcher crisply.

Did she thrash out problems with her husband? “No with colleagues.”

Had she ever been jealous of Mr Thatcher's first wife? “My dear,” her voice dropped another octave, “I never asked about Lady Hickmanher. I didn't want to hurt him, I never knew who she was or anything about her until I saw that interview with her in the paper.”

Was it reticence, sensitivity, or lack of curiosity one wonders. “I was rather shocked,” she went on, bowing her head, “to see how like me she was.”

After the brio with which she carried off the Tory leadership, didn't she think people were rather disappointed that there hadn't been more fireworks in the House? She said it was irresponsible to oppose for the sake of opposing.

“Harold Wilson was violently against Europe in opposition,” she said, “once he was in power he led everyone in. You get more respect y'know (occasionally she sounds like Doctor Dale) if you stick to y'guns. It's not worth sacrificing today for tomorrow.”

Backbenchers seem to like her and admire her decisiveness. “The party was in a frightful mess when she took over,” says George Young, Tory MP for Acton. “She remembers people's names, too. Ted never knew you from Adam.”

She also has a laudable ability to forgive. Her present Cabinet consists mostly of people who voted against her in the leadership struggle. She harbours neither grudges nor large sailing ships, unlike her predecessor, Mr. Heath, who continues to play hard to get, skulking like a great Achilles heel in his tent.

Although she is loyal about her front bench - “You can't ditch people who've served the party faithfully” - one suspects their greyness and lack of support may explain her constant references to the superiority of women over men in their guts, hard work and capacity for suffering. One of her heroines is Elizabeth I. “But today you'd never catch her saying Queen Elizabeth Ishe had the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a man.”

Tomorrow, she said, she was going down a submarine in a newly-arsquouired trouser suit. “And recently I went down a coal mine,” her voice dropped again dramatically, “I very much enjoyed it, miners have such quiet dignity don't you think?” Having experienced rather more robust qualities in my encounters with miners, I answered non-committally.

In the corner was a large television set propped up by a biography of Peel. “It's gone phut,” she said, and for an incredulous moment I thought she'd used a four-letter word. She can certainly sweat out a drink, she'd hardly touched her whisky, and never does more than break the surface of a single glass of wine at official dinners. One is constantly aware of the rigid self-control, the adherence to ladylike behaviour, and one suddenly longs for her to let rip like Grace Kelly in High Society. [end p1]

Her capacity for work is staggering. She rises at seven and works late into the night, existing on three-and-a-half hours sleep. She has great powers of concentration. The dustbins opposite are emptied between 1.30 and 2.30 in the morning, yet she never hears them. As a former tax lawyer, she has the ability to take in a brief very quickly.

She had just returned from what most people wouldn't call a holiday in Kent. “We owed it to the party,” she said gravely, “to recharge the batteries.”

She spent her time cooking, pottering about, being with the family and “enjoying the bliss of an ordinary life.” Even so, she got through a phenomenal number of books, including the entire definitive edition (845 pages) of Kipling's poems.

“Every poem?,” I said incredulously. “Every poem,” she repeated solemnly. “I read for pleasure and to activate the mind.”

Even as we were talking I felt she was working, rehearsing future speeches on me. Now she expounded on the need for set rules in architecture and in society, next she progressed to the “triumph of the human spirit.”

Politicians agree that her set speeches are less successful than the impromptu ones, when she is forced on to her feet. She excels at question time and on phone-ins, but admits, she is badly frightened every time she goes on television. To the television interviewer, however, she comes across in another light.

One household name on television describes her as calculating and ruthless. “She wages the most sophisticated warfare before the interview,” he says, “reducing you to pulp by complaining endlessly about the lighting being too harsh and the studio being too barnlike and not feminine enough.”

“During the interview itself her trick when you ask her an awkward question is to say: ‘I don't think you understand what I'm trying to say.’ If you look through the transcripts you see she does it all the time. In this way she catches the attention of the viewer who suddenly wakes up and says, ‘Ho ho, she's getting the better of that Robin Day’ or whomever.”

But this might be more than just professionalism. One feels that in a hostile atmosphere she too easily becomes uptight and unbending - that if she were more of a “chap” or had a trace of clsquouetry in her nature. It might be easier for her to communicate.

How does she cope with all the criticism? “The only thing one can do,” she said, “is to try and do a reasonable job. You can't perform at peak all the time, you must be satisfied with one or two superb performances. What matters in politics is resilience, the ability however hurt you feel inside to pick yourself up and start again.”