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Thatcher admitted to hospital

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher spent the night in a London hospital for a series of medical checks and returned home yesterday.

Thatcher, her arm held by a hospital staff member, waved to photographers before ducking into a Jaguar car outside St. Thomas's Hospital in south London, where she had been taken after feeling faint. She waved again as she stepped into her central London home a few minutes later.

The 82-year-old former Conservative leader had felt unwell during dinner with friends near the House of Lords in central London, said her private secretary, Mark Worthington, and her daughter, Carol.

Carol Thatcher said her mother was hospitalized as a precaution.

"Very wisely, at her age and with a history of little strokes, they decided to err on the side of caution," she said. "But it's good news today. She is doing well."

Britain's first female prime minister, nicknamed "the Iron Lady," has appeared in public less and less frequently after doctors banned her from addressing large audiences in 2002.

She has suffered a series of minor strokes, which figures close to her say have affected her short-term memory.

A hospital spokeswoman said in a statement: "We can confirm that Baroness Thatcher has been admitted to St Thomas' Hospital and is expected to remain in hospital overnight for observation."

"Her condition is stable and she is speaking to the medical staff who are caring for her," the statement said.

A spokeswoman for the Conservative Party, which she led from 1975 to 1990, said: "We have been in touch with her office and we wish her well."

Thatcher forced through sweeping changes during her premiership between 1979 and 1990, advocating individualism and the breakdown of Britain's class system.

At home Thatcher is a divisive figure, hailed by the right, who say she revived the economy by clamping down on trade unions and crushing a major strike by northern English miners protesting pit closures in 1985.

But others accuse her of heavyhandedness and intransigence, saying her reforms helped to unpick the fabric of society, particularly in the traditional manufacturing heartlands such as northern England.

She forged a close personal and political relationship with US president Ronald Reagan in the Cold War stand-off with the Soviet Union.

Her popularity soared when she sent troops to the Falkland Islands in 1982 after Argentina's invasion and Britain secured victory in two months.

She survived a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army during the Conservative Party's annual conference in Brighton, southern England, in 1984, which came close to killing her and her ministers.

Ultimately, though, it was her perceived inflexibility that brought her down -- her resistance to closer European ties was a key trigger to a revolt within the Conservatives, which led to John Major taking over from her in 1990.
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