What "Margaret Thatcher's Children The Crown" Did Right

Most parents avoid overt favoritism, as seen in the fourth season of The Crown (open in new tab), but Margaret Thatcher was not like most parents. She would probably never casually mention her favoritism in a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II.

This is perfectly exemplified in The Crown, which describes Thatcher's frantic response to reports of Mark's disappearance during a car race in 1982. What follows is the true story of Mark's international drama and Thatcher's relationship with him and Carol.

In January 1982, Marc and his co-driver and mechanic were competing in the Paris-Dakar Rally, an off-road race spanning France and West Africa, when they disappeared for nearly a week in the Sahara desert. A massive search was conducted, with several countries sending military aircraft and ground troops to look for the missing vehicles; according to the BBC (opens in new tab), Mark's father, Denis Thatcher, immediately flew to Dakar, Senegal, and his mother donated over 1,700 pounds to the search.

The crew was finally found by Algerian troops on January 14, 1982, about 30 miles off course.

Decades later, in a 2004 article in The Guardian (open in new tab), Mark described the experience. 'I did nothing to prepare. I did nothing. I did a half-day test, and the next day I drove from the Place de la Concorde in Paris. What would happen? I knew right away," he confessed.

He went on to point out that his mother's response to his disappearance was the right one, given the lack of accurate information about the situation.

"One of the biggest problems was that no one knew what was going on. Moreover, the information that was being relayed to London was mostly inaccurate. So the boss [the prime minister] did exactly the right thing and picked up the phone to the ambassador in Algiers and said, 'Can you find out what's going on? ' The ambassador called the prefect of the region and said there were four people missing and I was one of them."

According to numerous accounts, including that of her twin sister Carol. Carol told The Guardian (opens in new tab) in 2005 that, in contrast to her "glamorous" brother, "I was one-dimensional and dull. My mother tended to call me by my secretary's name, and I had to go through each secretary one by one until I got to Carroll."

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If this is not clear enough, after Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, The Independent (opens in new tab) reported that Carole once said, "I always felt I was the second of the two."

"I never felt I was top-notch, although 'unloved' is not the right word."

She also astutely responded to a question about Thatcher's frustration that both of her children had grown up and moved far away from their parents: "A mother would come home like a boomerang to her grown children, gushing coziness and cannot reasonably expect them to make up for lost time. A mother cannot reasonably expect her grown children to come back like boomerangs, spring out of coziness, and make up for lost time," says Carroll.

Whether it is the effect of their mother's obvious favoritism or typical sibling rivalry, Mark and Carol do not appear to be particularly close; the twins, born in August 1953, were in the same room in 2015 when Carol arranged to auction off half of her inheritance after her mother's death They reportedly could not even be in the same room when Carol arranged to auction off half of her mother's inheritance in 2015.

"For once, Mark is on the side of the angels," a Tory party source told the Daily Express (opens in new tab) at the time.

"His only concern is to protect his mother's estate and he considers this sale simply an abomination; they were very close and he would never have sold anything that belonged to her."

The magazine also reported that tensions between Carol and Mark were so high after their mother's death that they chose to communicate through their attorney on all matters concerning the estate.

The Thatcher twins have led remarkably different adult lives. After a short-lived racing career, Mark became a businessman, met and married his first wife, Diane Bergdorf, and had two children. His business dealings have often been controversial, facing allegations of unfairly profiting from his mother's position and longstanding questions of legality. In addition, in 2005, he was fined and given a four-year suspended prison sentence in South Africa for his involvement in a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea (open in new tab).

Meanwhile, Carroll became a journalist and reality star, and has never married or given birth. After starting her reporting career in Australia, she returned to the UK and contributed to the BBC and Daily Telegraph, etc. She won the fifth season of I'm a Celebrity.Get Me Out of Here. in 2005 and appeared on Most Haunted in 2007. She appeared as a celebrity guest on "Most Haunted" in 2007. However, her career took a downturn when she used a racist term to describe professional tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga during a 2009 broadcast, and the BBC announced that she would no longer appear on any future shows (open in new tab).

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