workaholicdemocracy is peculiarly cruel to its defeated leaders. The familiar spectacle of the removal vans in Downing Street the morning after a General Election is an undignified one. Mrs Thatcher had witnessed at first hand Ted Heath’s abrupt and unanticipated ejection from office in February 1974. It was very largely the example of his predicament, with no alternative home to retreat to, so that he was forced to squat for several months in a small flat lent him by a Tory MP, that had prompted her to buy an unsuitable house in Dulwich as some sort of insurance policy against a similar fate. Her dismissal was actually less abrupt than most: she had almost a week between her decision to resign and the moment of departure – six days to pack up and say her farewells. Yet her defeat was also more brutal, since it was inflicted not by the electorate but by her own MPs. In June 1983 and June 1987 she had been packed and psychologically prepared: in November 1990 she was not.Thatcher was a compulsive workaholic, still full of energy, with no interests outside politics. The loss of office deprived her almost overnight of her main reason for living. She had always dreaded the prospect of retirement. ‘I think my definition of Hell is having a lot of time and not having any idea of what to do with it,’ she told She magazine in 1987.1 ‘Happiness is not doing nothing,’ she reiterated to Woman’s Own. ‘Happiness in an adult consists of having a very full day, being absolutely exhausted at the end of it but knowing that you have had a very full day.’2 When she talked of having a full day she meant a full day’s work; and what she meant by work was politics. She could no more walk away from politics than she could stop breathing.
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