How Margaret Thatcher almost lost her heart to a doctor twice her age before marrying Denis She had already met him because of his role at the local hospital, and described him as "sweet" in a letter to her sister, Muriel, quoted in her authorised biography. By early 1950 things had developed, and she wrote that: "I think we are both getting very fond of one another - in fact more than that. I hope so. She also told her sister that on the day of the general election in Feb 1950: "Robert and I are dining and dancing at the Berkeley...hope you won't mind my going out then. On Saturday I'm going down to Eastbourne for the weekend. Robert is coming to join me on the Sunday staying overnight and he will drive me back on the Monday. Needless to say I'm looking forward to it tremendously. The author, Charles Moore, suggests this was "as near as Margaret ever came to enjoying a naughty weekend." In another letter to her sister, Lady Thatcher wrote of Henderson: "I go out with him most weekends and one night during the week, but whether it will come to anything I very much doubt for he thinks the difference between our ages very great." Nevertheless, she continued to try to impress him, telling her sister that when he visited her at a newly-rented flat in London, "I cooked a slap-up dinner, four courses just to show him!" Mr Moore notes that in her letters, "it is clear that Margaret felt more tender towards Robert than towards Denis" and that during the two years when she was dating both men "there is not the slightest hint in any letter of Margaret's that she is serious about Denis, while she explicitly states that she is so about Robert." Denis Thatcher, who was ten years older than Margaret, married her in 1951. When Mr Moore asked Lady Thatcher whether Henderson perhaps hoped she would marry him, she said: "I wouldn't disagree with that, but he was so much older." She never forgot him, and when he died in 1999 she wrote to his widow saying he was a "wonderful man."