Margaret Thatcher's disgraceful son who made the Dakar Rally fashionable

BarcelonaIn January 1982, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a host of headaches. The intelligence services were warning her that the Argentine military junta was likely preparing an invasion of the Falkland Islands, demonstrations were taking place against her decision to raise taxes, and her son had disappeared. On January 13, 1982, before giving a speech to the National Federation of Self-Employed Workers, Thatcher even lost her balance, visibly shaken. iron lady It seemed on the verge of collapse, as her son, Mark Thatcher, had been missing for five days in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet: the Sahara Desert.

Mark Thatcher had specialized in giving his mother headaches. The Conservative leader made firm decisions from her position at 10 Downing Street, but she couldn't get her son to bring order to his life. The politician didn't flinch when it came to negotiating with union leaders, generals, or heads of state, but her son almost made her cry in public in January 1982. Mark was too fond of going out with women, luxury goods, and parties. And he had a passion: motorsports, which is why in the 1970s he had decided to become a racing driver, causing a scandal when he agreed to advertise a nudist magazine in exchange for them sponsoring him in a race. It seems his mother managed to avoid the image of her son surrounded by naked people at the last minute, but she couldn't keep him away from the racetracks he frequented, often accompanied by young models. In 1980, Mark Thatcher debuted in the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans, where he would return in 1981, retiring both times. It was then that a Peugeot executive told him about the Paris-Dakar Rally, a brand-new event at the time. "He asked me if I'd like to participate with them. I said yes and completely forgot about it. And then, a year and a half later, the guy calls and says, 'Can you come to Paris next Tuesday for the Paris-Dakar press conference?' I thought, 'Oh God, I'd forgotten about that!' But then I thought about it and realized that not many people get the chance to try to cross the Sahara Desert," Thatcher himself would write years later. The Guardian.

Mark Thatcher had forgotten he had committed to going to the Dakar Rally. "I didn't prepare at all," he would admit years later. The Briton recruited mechanic Jacky Garnier for the adventure and Frenchwoman Anne-Charlotte Verney, a highly respected name from the 24 Hours of Le Mans, as his co-driver. But they had no experience outside of racing. It was an ill-advised and poorly prepared project, destined to fail.

The 1982 edition was only the fourth Paris-Dakar Rally. Back then, almost all the participants were French, and the teams weren't professional like they are now. The rally was Thierry Sabine's ideaA Frenchman from a good family, an adventure lover, who had spent three days lost in the Sahara Desert while participating in a race between Abidjan and Nice in 1977. Instead of being scared, he decided to organize his own rally starting in Paris. In 1982, the Dakar Rally was little known outside of France; it hadn't quite taken off. Perhaps that's why Sabine planned very tough routes, hoping to attract the attention of journalists. In 1982, in fact, three people would lose their lives in accidents: a journalist, a spectator run over in Mali, and a Dutch driver. But it was the death of Mark Thatcher that ended up grabbing the headlines and, incidentally, gave the Paris-Dakar Rally more fame.

Mark Thatcher arrived in Paris very elegantly dressed, surrounded by journalists. He thought it would be a piece of cake. "I did half a day of testing before leaving the Place de la Concorde in Paris. By the third day, we were already in the desert with very, very long stages, spending hours pointing at something tiny on the horizon. Unfortunately, the Peugeot 504 was the worst car for the journey," he would recall. He soon realized it was all a mistake. He was tired, his body ached, and he just prayed to finish the stages somehow, so he usually joined a caravan with other vehicles doing their best. On the eighth stage, he was driving behind other cars on a track between Tamanrasset and Timiaouine, near the border between Algeria and Mali, when the car hit an object and had to stop. They were left alone in the desert. "The other cars continued on and said they would report our position, but the inept drivers gave the wrong information," the Briton explained. Hours passed, and no one came to rescue them. So they had to spend the night in the car. "The order was not to abandon the car, as it was worse to end up lost on foot. We saw some trucks in the distance because there was a mine in the area; we thought they would locate us quickly, but the first day passed and nothing. On the second day, we realized things were getting serious," she would later say. At night it was cold, their water was running out, and the three occupants of the vehicle, Thatcher, Verney, and Garnier, were beginning to worry. So was their mother, who, upon receiving the news, asked her husband to fly to Algeria to oversee everything. The British embassy was activated, and the Algerian government deployed soldiers. The French government also sent three military aircraft, but days passed and they couldn't find them. The press began reporting on the case, and the day Margaret Thatcher nearly collapsed, it was broadcast around the world. For the first time, the international press was talking about the Paris-Dakar Rally. Finally, a helicopter approached the area, and Thatcher was able to attract its attention with a flare. "In five minutes, two Land Rovers appeared," she explained. Algerian Prime Minister Mohamed Ben Ahmed called Margaret Thatcher to inform her that they had met with her son shortly before he was reunited with his father at the hotel in Timiæouine, where they spent approximately €1,000 together, mainly on drinks. This sum would later be paid to the mother, incidentally, when she faced criticism from the opposition, who questioned how much the British had paid for her son's rescue. Thatcher explained that the Algerian government hadn't received any payment, but she hastened to send a check to the Algerian hotel, just in case.

The Mark Thatcher incident became the best publicity for the race. In 1983, the car race was won by Belgian Jacky Ickx, a legend of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, with actor Claude Cervecero as his co-driver. Many celebrities wanted to participate, and in 1984, Prince Albert of Monaco made his debut. His sister Caroline attended in 1985 as a co-driver in a truck driven by her husband, Stefano Casiraghi. And Mark Thatcher? Well, he left the world of motorsports, but he never stopped causing his mother grief. His name appears in the Panama Papers, he was ordered to pay three million dollars in South Africa for allegedly financing a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea, he was accused of corruption, and some countries, like Switzerland, have denied him residency.