Margaret Thatcher took £600 electric baths to 'stay youthful'

Margaret Thatcher – the 'Iron Lady' – used to visit an Indian practitioner who would run 0.3amp of electricity through water to keep herself young, a new memoir recalls.

The former Conservative prime minister believed that the baths, along with mud and oil treatments, recharged the nervous system and released any "blocked" energy.

"If it is true that the prime minister does indulge in this, then it obviously works… She looks very good these days," said then-Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens on Thatcher's beauty secret.

The Daily Mail reports that Thatcher used to visit an "Indian guru woman" called Veronique, who treated the Iron Lady with the "electric baths" in a three-storey Victorian semi-detached house in Shepherd's Bush, west London.

Thatcher's use of the £600 baths was featured in a 1989 profile on her in Vanity Fair.

Gail Sheehy, who wrote the 1989 profile on Thatcher, was particularly interested in the peculiar method the politician used to keep up a youthful appearance.

"I was trying to understand how she could be 60 years old, it was her 10th year in office and she looked 20 years younger," Sheehy told the Huffington Post.

It seems that Thatcher was invested in her beauty regime more seriously than she was given credit for.

"It was time the government ought to show their tremendous appreciation for everything the fashion industry does. It employs 300,000, it does £1bn exports and I have felt for quite a long time that we don't give them enough government moral support for the tremendous work they're doing," she said in a 1979 interview in The Sun. "There is a nonsense about intelligent women not being beautiful. There is no genetic link between brains and beauty. Most women are far more intelligent than people give them credit for."

Thatcher was also keen on watching her weight. "You can't indulge. It will sit on your hips," Thatcher said in the 1979 interview.