Viewers invited to an early screening of the film, The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep as the former Prime Minister and Jim Broadbent as Sir Denis, were aghast at the way that it mocks her frail condition in recent years.

One called it ‘insulting’. Another said: ‘I didn’t come here to see a film about granny going mad.’…

Her relationship with Sir Denis is shown as affectionate early on, but when she tells him she is running for the Tory leadership in 1974 he calls her ‘insufferable’ for putting her ‘ambition before me and the children’.

Following his death, she hallucinates about him, making her condition worse. Likewise, Sir Denis’s eccentricities are played up and combined with a near spitefulness. It is true that Sir Denis once had a pink turban thrust on his head on an official visit to India, but friends say it is nonsense to suggest he resented his wife’s career.