LONDON, June 26: Sir Denis Thatcher, the discreet pillar of strength behind Britain’s first woman prime minister Margaret Thatcher, died at a London hospital on Thursday. He was 88.

“It is with deep sadness that we have to announce that Sir Denis Thatcher passed away peacefully this morning in the Lister Hospital after a short illness,” a spokesman for the Thatcher family said.

“His family were with him at his bedside when he died.”

Although he kept a low profile throughout his wife’s tenure in Downing Street, Denis Thatcher was unflinching in his loyalty to the “Iron Lady”, whose hard-nosed brand of conservatism reshaped Britain’s political landscape in the 1980s.

“He never falls asleep and always claps in the right places,” she once said of him.

Last January, Denis Thatcher underwent a coronary bypass operation in London. Doctors at the time deemed the surgery a success, and he went off to South Africa to recuperate.

Baroness Thatcher, 77, and her husband were married for more than 50 years.

She looked frail when she made her last public appearance, at a corporate directors’ meeting in London at the end of April, where she praised current prime minister Tony Blair for taking Britain into the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Besides having suffered from a stroke, Lady Thatcher is said by friends to be suffering from memory loss.

Often depicted by political satirists as a buffoon, Denis Thatcher was in fact an astute businessman and a millionaire before his wife took over the Conservatives in 1975, then led them to power in 1979.

Lady Thatcher described him as the “golden thread” running through her life, and often declared that she could not have been a success without his loyalty and support.

He was famed for his “tinctures” for what his journalist daughter Carol Thatcher called his “copious” intake of gin, and for hobnobbing with reporters when he joined his wife on travels abroad.—AFP