"Sir Mark Thatcher: Mumsy's Boy"

"Save me, Mummy", read a placard hanging from a window opposite Cape Town's High Court last week. Sir Mark Thatcher is not noted for his quick intellect, but if he saw the poster as he left the courthouse, even he could hardly have failed to grasp its message. Baroness Thatcher's wayward son had just got out of his worst scrape yet; a charge of involvement in a Frederick Forsyth-style coup plot that could have landed him in a South African jail for 15 years, and everyone assumed that she had somehow extricated him. It would not have been the first time, after all.

The former prime minister put up the £180,000 bail, freeing her son from house arrest last August. When he was in trouble in the US several years ago, she contributed to a £330,000 out-of-court settlement with an embittered former business partner, who accused him of conspiracy, money laundering, usury, perjury, theft and assault. So it would not be surprising to learn that she had settled the £300,000 fine which Sir Mark was sentenced to pay on Wednesday. That, and a four-year suspended jail sentence, was at the centre of the plea bargain which allowed him to fly out of South Africa the same day. He admitted that he had begun to suspect that a helicopter in which he invested $275,000 (£147,000) might be intended for "mercenary activity", but went ahead with the deal, contravening South Africa's Foreign Military Assistance Act.

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