Turning Back Time

‘AGE catches up with us all eventually – and this morning we learn that it has overtaken even the Iron Lady.

‘Ah, it seems I’ll be 65 again tomorrow’

In an interview with the Times, Sir Bernard Ingham paints a bleak picture of Lady Thatcher, ‘the woman who ruled the nation with a grip of iron for a decade’.

‘She is physically not too bad,’ he said, ‘although she’s shrunken with age and is thin. She has very little short-term memory left.’

However, Sir Bernard, her former press secretary, says the 77-year-old ex-PM, who has suffered a series of strokes, is still working.

‘She sits there and she either has something on her mind,’ he says, ‘or I am expected to tell her what’s on my mind and it goes on from there and she asks questions and takes notes.’

Is it too late to dream of a comeback for la grande dame of the British political scene?

Perhaps not, with news in the Telegraph that fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has discovered the secret to permanent youth – lying about your age.

The German will celebrate his 65th birthday tomorrow, 70 years after his birth – and you don’t need to be a retired Scotland Yard detective to realise that something is amiss.

But Lagerfeld, who looks more like a Thunderbird puppet with every passing day, attributes his new-found youth to a diet of horsemeat and hare.

By the way, whatever did happen to Virgil Tracy?’

Posted: 9th, September 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink