Award-winning author Hilary Mantel has revealed she fantasised about killing Margaret Thatcher.
Her fantasies about killing Mrs Thatcher, who Mantel called "a psychological transvestite", inspired her new short story about the assassination of the former prime minister.
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, the Devon-based author recalled the day in 1983 when she spotted an unguarded Mrs Thatcher from the window of her Windsor flat and fantasised about killing her.
"Immediately your eye measures the distance," she reportedly told the newspaper, her finger and thumb forming a gun. "I thought, if I wasn't me, if I was someone else, she'd be dead."
The experience inspired The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: August 6th 1983, published exclusively in The Guardian yesterday.
The story has already proved controversial, with the Daily Telegraph pulling out of a deal to publish the story first, despite reportedly paying tens of thousands of pounds – a figure denied by the Telegraph – to secure exclusive rights.
Mantel, who lives in Budleigh Salterton, is outspoken about her low opinion of the former prime minister.
In an interview with the writer of Maggie and Me, Damian Barr, published on Friday by the Guardian, she talked about the "boiling detestation" she felt for the woman she believed had set back the cause of women.
Thatcher was anti-feminist and a "psychological transvestite", Mantel said.
The two-time Man Booker prizewinner's short story tells of a well-off woman waiting in her Windsor flat for a plumber.
The man she lets in turns out to be an assassin who wants to use her bedroom to shoot Thatcher as she leaves the private hospital opposite after an eye operation.
Mantel, who was made a dame in this year's birthday honours, said Thatcher was a "fantastic character" for a writer, "the very stuff of drama".
"When I think of her, I can still feel that boiling detestation. She did longstanding damage in many areas of national life, but I am not either of [the two characters] in that room.
"I am standing by the window with the notebook. I never voted for her, but I can stand back and appreciate her as a phenomenon. As a citizen, I suffered from her but, as a writer, I benefited."
Mantel said there were parallels between Thatcher and Thomas Cromwell, her main writing obsession, in that both were self made. Thatcher, though, hated the end result.
"She couldn't turn herself into a posh girl with the right vowels. If you're that dissatisfied with yourself you try to fix other people, and if they won't be fixed you become punitive."
She added: "She imitated masculine qualities to the extent that she had to get herself a good war. The Falklands was great stuff – limited casualties, little impact on the home front and great visual propaganda. I am not suggesting this was conscious.
"I suspect Thatcher was the last person in the world to be able to examine her inner life, but she could sell a myth. The idea that women must imitate men to succeed is anti-feminist. She was not of woman born. She was a psychological transvestite."
The best-selling author revealed it had taken 30 years to write – "I just couldn't see how to get [the characters] to work together" – but she had not been waiting for Mrs Thatcher's death to write it.
"I am concerned with respect, I'm not concerned with taste. I would have happily concluded the story in her lifetime but couldn't – it was my technical difficulty, not any delicacy. I believe in walking that line. You mustn't be too timid to risk getting it wrong."
Mantel told The Guardian she was unfazed by an controversy the short story might provoke.
"As a writer you have a choice to make – are you going to accept censorship or not?," she said.
Writing short stories has provided Mantel with a break from Cromwell, although she said she expected to complete The Mirror and the Light, the third instalment of her trilogy, next year. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies won the Man Booker prize in 2009 and 2012 respectively.
The Thatcher story is part of Mantel's first short story collection for 11 years, which will be published on September 30.
