The daughter of former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher has spoken for the first time about her mother's struggle with dementia.
In her new book, serialised in the Mail on Sunday, Carol Thatcher says she first noticed her mother's memory was failing over lunch in 2000.
She says she "almost fell off her chair" seeing her mother struggle.
Baroness Thatcher, 82, had to be reminded several times her husband, Sir Denis, had died, Ms Thatcher says.
In her book, A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl: A Memoir, she tells of how her mother's "blotting-paper brain", which had always absorbed information, began to fail eight years ago - a decade after leaving power.
The former Conservative prime minister got confused between Bosnia and the Falklands during a conversation about the war in the former Yugoslavia, Ms Thatcher writes.
"I almost fell off my chair. Watching her struggle with her words and her memory, I couldn't believe it," she says.
"She was in her 75th year but I had always thought of her as ageless, timeless and 100% cast-iron damage-proof."
The contrast was all the more striking because she had always had a memory "like a website", she writes.
BBC NEWS | Politics | Thatcher dementia fight revealed
Margaret Thachter has Dementia
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