A surprise that Thather could sleep at all
A lot has been made of Margaret Thatcher's ability to function on four
hours’ sleep a night. Her biographer, Moore, indicates that this is
something of a myth. No, she didn’t sleep much, but often this made her tetchy and erratic. The people who worked for her knew when she was tired, and they also knew when to use ‘tiredness’ as a euphemism for her having had one whisky too many. Moore is quite coy on this subject, never telling us exactly how much she drank. She consumed plentiful quantities of whisky and ginger ale, ‘but she was never drunk,’ and she did not get through as much as Denis, who could more or less subsist on gin. She didn’t have hangovers and she didn’t get ill (she sometimes had toothache). Her skin continued to glow and her eye remained fierce.
More striking than the amount of sleep she needed was her ability to sleep at all, given what she put herself and others through on a daily basis. She had no hobbies and no real interests outside politics, though she did occasionally indulge in bouts of housework as a way to pass the time. What she really liked to do was worry away at political problems. She was a stickler for detail and a devoted consumer of her red boxes.
When things went wrong for her, she invariably concluded it was because she had been insufficiently prepared, and resolved to get back to her papers. Time and again Moore records the surprise of those she met – from heads of state to humble journalists – at how well she was briefed.
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