The Iron Lady - remember me?

At first no one knew how to address the toppled Leaderene. "Do we still call you Prime Minister?" enquired Gerald Howarth MP, her parliamentary private secretary, after the downfall. "No," came the contralto reply. After a pause: "Call me Margaret." But Tories who had, in private, long referred to her as "Mother", could not entertain such familiarity. So they made her Hon President of the No Turning Back Group, which meant they could call her "Madam President".

Then there was the practical matter of where to sit in the Commons. John Major's Whips pettily wanted her to sit "below the gangway" (well away from the Government front bench, lest there be suggestions she was a "back-seat driver"). She ignored them and sat three rows back, directly behind the very ministers who mere days earlier had been her own.

Margaret Thatcher has admitted that, at first, she felt that "a great weight had been lifted". On the day itself, 22 November 1990, she repeatedly "gave way to tears" during a Cabinet meeting. "Most of the day and the next few days I felt as if I were sleepwalking," she has recalled.

How has she filled the days since? Is she bearing up? Are there still tears? "Never a day goes by when she does not wake up and wish that she was still Prime Minister," says Lord Powell, her foreign affairs adviser in Downing Street. "In my view, she is right to hold such a view." Gerald Howarth agrees that "she is often frustrated".

Is she bitter? Howarth says not, although he himself - like many other loyalists - remains intensely angry about "the pygmies who knifed her". The other day she spoke at a constituency dinner in Essex for her former aide John Whittingdale MP. More than 670 people paid to hear her - not bad for a "has been".

Tomorrow's 10th anniversary of her resignation will go unmarked at Chesham Place, HQ of the Thatcher Foundation. Her office there is a grand affair. It has high, corniced ceilings, a sweeping staircase, and one of those power-people telephones that has lots of buttons and a conference call facility.

She arrives most days before 10am and will stay until 7pm. Lunch, if there is no invitation out, will be a sandwich or a bowl of nourishing soup at her desk while she watches the headlines and market prices on Teletext.

In power she was given only a digest of news, but these days she is voracious for newsprint. A fellow guest at a weekend house party reports her being "impatient for the arrival of the morning papers. When they finally arrived, she seized them with hunger." Social contacts tend to be old political friends rather than family - her daughter Carol lives in Switzerland and her son Mark is in South Africa. Friends say she is sad not to see more of Mark and his young children.

Former Tory ministers who see her regularly include Michael Howard and Lord (Norman) Lamont. Michael Portillo may have slipped off the invitation list for the annual Christmas party at her well-appointed Chester Square home. It is said she feels "disappointed" by Mr Portillo's Leftwards shimmy. She thinks far better of William Hague, whom she sees occasionally. And Sir Denis likes Ffion.

Others who remain close include her old press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham, Sir Archie Hamilton MP, Lord (Cecil) Parkinson, her former aide Lord Wolfson and Lord Wakeham's wife Alison.

Her recent international visitors have included George Bush Snr, Giscard D'Estaing, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew and the Australian premier John Howard.

Soon after the 1997 General Election she could also be found chewing the fat with Tony Blair, who invited her to Downing Street, if only to show Middle England what a regular guy he was. The Pinochet affair put a stop to the love-in.

Nor did she endear herself to Blairites with her memorable attack on British Airways' multi-cultural tailfins (she placed a hanky over a model of the designs). "I was with her that day," laughs John Whittingdale. "A £5-million marketing campaign was destroyed with just one paper hanky. It showed she can still grab a headline like no one else." Some acquaintances suggest that the former Iron Lady may have a befuddled view of her own importance. Unkind commentators have implied that she is mad (a claim sometimes put by opponents during her premiership).

Satirists have also ventured that she slugs back more Famous Grouse whisky than may always be good for her.

Nonsense, says Mark Worthington, an aide. She has only the occasional glass of wine and seldom more than one whisky-and-soda nightcap. She eats heartily. She likes her meat well cooked - "pink? certainly not!" - and has a sweet tooth for puddings. And she often cooks her husband Sir Denis his brekker. "DT is now in his eighties and a little frail. She is most attentive to him," says a family friend.

In recent weeks she has read The Grey Dawn, a study of the effects of an ageing population on the world, and Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital. Fiction is less popular, although she was recently spotted with the new Rosamunde Pilcher.

After Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, Lady Thatcher is the top draw on the US lecture circuit. Fees can reach around £35,000 a pop.

For this, a business organisation or a conference will get a potted, pungent version of the Thatcher view of the world. Many Americans think she is still PM. Some even mistake her for the Queen.

Lord Armstrong, the former Cabinet Secretary, says: "She travels incessantly. I hope she enjoys it. It's a kind of compulsion. She thrives on the people she meets who admire and respect her. "She is still lively and vigorous. I don't think she has forgiven those who brought her down. Politics remains her main interest. One of her problems always was that she did not have many other interests." She has never been easy company. An old courtier says that "having her for a weekend can be fairly demanding. You need relays of guests - one lot to do the day shift, and then be tossed out, exhausted, before another lot take over for the evening session. She grills them. It is stimulating - but exhausting." Consider what she has not done. She has not become an ambassador, has not been given an Oxbridge college to run, has not taken a big international job and has not remained in the House of Commons. But she has remained, indubitably, her own woman: outspoken, quirky, still very much "Maggie".