Just as the Government cannot throw off the gigantic shadow of Mrs Thatcher, so her children cannot escape it either. Carol Thatcher struggled to find an independent identity while her mother was in power. Now that Mrs Thatcher shakes her gory locks at her successors, Carol is still being called to account.

Her failure to pay a £32 poll tax bill is a matter of national interest. But she does not attract the same public indignation as brother Mark. Never the favourite child, Carol has achieved wide popularity. She had not demanded privileges nor pity. She is what the British call A Brick. Carol, 38, presents a tall, robust slightly hefty figure. She wears loads of noisy, chunky jewellery – ‘she looks like a walking mobile,’ says one of her friends – and lots of make-up. She appeared on the list of Worst Dressed Women while in Australia, a fact she jokingly brings to people’s attention. She has said she just puts on whichever clothes are nearest. ‘She likes to look smart, but she has a problem cultivating the feminine side of her nature because she is so jolly hockey sticks,’ says a colleague.

‘Carol lives a very ordinary life, is very much one of the gang and would never dream of pulling rank,’ says her best friend Gabrielle Crawford, the former wife of Michael Crawford. (‘I do wish people would realise I’m just an ordinary sort of bugger,’ Carol likes to say.) She lives alone in a modest two-up two-down in Fulham with a massive satellite dish on the roof. ‘It’s Chinese crossed with Peter Jones,’ Carol once said of the interior.

A friend says she had up that poster of Gone With the Wind that had her mother and Reagan’s faces superimposed, the theme being that they were going to blow away the world. Her mother asked her to take it down, but she didn’t.

Publicly she has denounced the idea of marriage – humorously, rejecting school runs, being a switchboard for children’s calls and errant au pairs. But the truth is that she has had unhappy, broken love affairs and at 38 remains less than happily childless and unmarried. ‘I think she desperately wants to be married and have children,’ says one friend.

‘She hasn’t found the right man. It’s down to that. You couldn’t meet anyone more fun. It’s not fair to give the impression that she is particularly lonely,’ says Gabrielle Crawford. ‘She has got lots of friends and she travels a lot. It’s not easy to have that sort of career and children. It could still happen, and he’ll be a very lucky man. Still, for the moment, Carol has no boyfriend.’

She had a publicised and unhappy love affair with Jonathan Aitken – after which she left for Australia. More recently, it was Roger Alton, weekend-section editor of The Guardian, whose photo occupied a place on her mantelpiece.

‘She desperately needs to be loved and she had a tumultuous relationship with Roger. She was besotted with him. And the more he mistreated her, the keener she became. She was deeply upset at the break-up of the relationship.’

But years of experience have taught Carol how to ‘put a brave face on things’. She grew up with a working mother, which was slightly out of vogue at the time. She had a nanny, then went to a boarding school in Hertfordshire which she announced she was going to leave, aged 16. She then went to St Paul’s in Hammersmith before London University where she read Law while her peers demonstrated against her milk-snatching mother. She went on to qualify as a solicitor.

Close friends say that as a child she was denied her mother’s affection in favour of her twin brother Mark. ‘Mark was fawned over by her mother, and she resents that. She calls him ‘a prat’ in private.

‘When Carol’s drunk – and she can have one too many – she chats away about how she can’t stand him,’ says a friend. ‘This causes problems to her, because she blurts out things that she regrets later.’ A lot of friends point out that Carol enjoys a drink.

Her relationship with her mother has, inevitably, determined much of her life. She is acutely aware that being Your Know Who’s daughter is double-edged.

‘It’s difficult to grow up in the limelight and come out to be your own person, people don’t allow you to,’ reflects her friend Sally Nesbitt, eldest daughter of Lord Hunt of Everest. ‘And it’s difficult to build a career because you’re perceived as having made it before you’ve even begun.’ Failure is often gleefully recorded.

One recalls her untimely demise at The Daily Telegraph, her less than best-seller books, and colleagues who reckon her to be a bit of a plodder. ‘She is an extremely hard-working and tremendously professional journalist,’ counters her close friend and broadcaster Victoria Mather. ‘She’s wonderful at Loose Ends,’ offers the broadcaster Ned Sherrin who claims to carry ‘a great candle’ for her. ‘She’s super sporting and always suggesting ideas.’

Carol avoids being political but cannot shake off politics. She has said: ‘Just by my name I’ve polarised dinner parties when someone’s said, ‘I think your mother is the greatest thing since canned custard,’ or ‘She has ruined the country’.’

Mrs Thatcher can still divide dinner parties, but she is on the wane, and according to Carol’s friends, this will release her from the yoke. ‘She will soon be able to be her own woman,’ predicts a friend.

nHer own woman, is the good egg. Entertaining, direct, jolly, noisy, honest. People says she’s a terrific sport, that she’s ‘one of the lads’. She calls people ‘mate’ and is very much The Action Women.

‘She’s always off slaloming or down a coal mine,’ says Ned Sherrin. Good-egg stories about her abound. Once she was asked to blow into a windmill which turned out to be a soot-blowing machine. ‘A practical joke the Austrians like to play on you in the Alps,’ remarks friend Arnie Wilson, a skiing correspondent. ‘On another occasion I smashed into her skiing and knocked her flat. She brushed herself off and said, ‘It’s lucky I’m not a fragile blonde’.’

A good egg, but is she happy? ‘She doesn’t strike me as very secure,’ says one friend. ‘But given the situation with her mother she is coping very well.’