BarcelonaIn January 1982 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a lot of headaches. The secret services warned him that the Argentine military junta was probably preparing an invasion of the Falkland Islands, there were demonstrations against his decision to increase taxes and his son had disappeared. On January 13, 1982, before giving a speech to the National Federation of the Self-Employed, Thatcher lost her balance, visibly affected. The iron lady it seemed on the verge of breaking, since Mark Thatcher, his son, 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 decisions firmly installed in number 10 Downing Street, but she could not get her son to put order in his life. The politician didn’t flinch when it came to dealing with trade unionists, generals or heads of state, but his son nearly brought him to tears in public that January 1982. Mark was too fond of girls, luxury goods and parties. And he had a passion: the motor, which is why in the 70s he had decided to become a pilot, causing a scandal when he agreed to advertise a nudist magazine in exchange for being his sponsor in a race. It seems that the mother managed to avoid the image of her son surrounded by naked people at the last moment, but she could not keep him away from the circuits where he arrived accompanied by young models. In 1980, Mark Thatcher made his debut at the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans, where he would return in 1981, retiring both times. It was here that a Peugeot manager told him about the Paris-Dakar, a test that had just been born at that time. “He asked me if I wanted to be in it 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 my god, I had forgotten about that! But then I thought about it and realized that not many people have the opportunity to try to cross the Sahara desert” Thatcher himself would write years later in The Guardian.
Mark Thatcher had forgotten that he had pledged to go to the Dakar. “I didn’t prepare for anything” he would admit years later. The British would recruit the mechanic Jacky Garnier for the adventure and the French Anne-Charlotte Verney, a well-respected name in the 24 hours of Le Mans, to be his co-pilot. But without experience outside the circuits. It was an unconscious and poorly prepared project. Destined to fail.
The 1982 edition was just the fourth Paris-Dakar. Back then almost all the participants were French and the teams were not professional like they are now. The rally was the brainchild of Thierry Sabine, an adventure-loving Frenchman of good family who had spent three days lost in the Sahara desert while taking part in a test between Abidjan and Nice in 1977. Rather than panic, he decided to organize his own rally from Paris. In 1982, the Dakar was little known outside of France, it had not yet started. Maybe that’s why Sabine programmed very hard routes, hoping to attract the attention of journalists. That 1982, in fact, three people would lose their lives in accidents: a journalist, a spectator hit in Mali and a Dutch pilot. But it was the disappearance of Mark Thatcher that ended up grabbing the headlines and, by the way, gave more fame to the Paris-Dakar.
Mark Thatcher arrived elegantly in Paris, surrounded by journalists. I thought it would be blowing and making bottles. “I did half a day of testing before leaving the Place de la Concorde in Paris. By the third day we were in the desert with very, very long stages, spending hours aiming at something very small on the horizon. Unfortunately, the Peugeot 504 was the worst car to make the trip,” he would recall. It didn’t take long to understand that it was all a mistake. He was tired, his body ached and he was just praying to finish the stages no matter what, so he used to caravan along with other vehicles doing what they could. In 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 followed and said they would warn of our position, but the inepts gave the wrong information,” the Briton would explain.
The hours went by and no one was coming to rescue them. So it was their turn to spend the night in the car. “The slogan was not to leave the car, as it was worse to end up lost on foot. We saw a truck 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. The second day we saw that it was scary,” he would say. At night it was cold, the water was running out and the three crew members of the vehicle, Thatcher, Verney and Garnier, were beginning to worry. Also the mother, who upon receiving the news asked her husband to take a flight to Algeria to oversee everything. The British embassy was activated and the Algerian government deployed soldiers. The French government also sent three military planes, but days passed and they were not found. The press began to report on the case and on the day Margaret Thatcher almost collapsed it was taken halfway around the world. For the first time, the international press was talking about Paris-Dakar. Finally, a helicopter approached the area and Thatcher was able to attract its attention with a flare. “Within five minutes, two Land Rovers appeared,” he explained. Algerian Prime Minister Mohamed Ben Ahmed called Margaret Thatcher to inform her that they had met his son shortly before he was reunited with his father at the Timiaouine hotel, where together they spent an estimated €1,000, mainly on drinks. A figure that the mother would end up paying, by the way, when she received attacks from the opposition asking how much it had cost the British to rescue her son. Thatcher explained that the Algerian government had not collected anything, but she hurried to get a check to the Algerian hotel, just in case.
The Mark Thatcher incident became the best publicity for the test. In 1983 the car event was won by the Belgian Jacky Ickx, a legend of the 24 hours of Le Mans, with actor Claude Brasseur as co-driver. Many famous people wanted to go there and in 1984 Prince Albert of Monaco made his debut there. His sister Carolina went there in 1985 as co-pilot in a truck belonging to her husband Stéfano Casiraghi. And Mark Thatcher? Well, he left the motoring world, but he didn’t stop making his mother suffer. His name appears in the Panama papers, he was sentenced to pay three million dollars to South Africa for the possible financing of a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea, he was accused of corruption and some states like Switzerland have not given him a residence permit.
