[4][5] Thatcher and his twin sister, Carol, were born six weeks prematurely by caesarean section on 15 August 1953 at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in Hammersmith, London, the same year that their mother qualified as a barrister.
[9] Having taken various short-term jobs Thatcher moved to Hong Kong, where he built up a network of business connections, particularly in the Middle East and in motor racing.
[9] On 9 January 1982 Thatcher, his French driver, Anny-Charlotte Verney, and their mechanic went missing for six days in the Sahara whilst driving a Peugeot 504 in the Paris-Dakar Rally.
[9] Sir Bernard Ingham, the Prime Minister's press secretary, suggested that he could best help the government win the 1987 general election by leaving the country.
[16] During this period he spent some time in Switzerland as a tax exile, until he was forced to leave after the Swiss authorities began to question his residency qualifications.
[14] A security alarm business he ran in the United States failed and in 1996 he was prosecuted for tax evasion, at which point he moved to Constantia, South Africa, with his wife and their two children.
According to the Star of Johannesburg, the company had offered unofficial small loans to hundreds of police officers, military personnel and civil servants, and then pursued them with debt collectors.
[17] In 2003, following the death of his father, he was allowed to use the title of 'Sir' due to his inheritance of the Thatcher baronetcy a year before he was arrested in South Africa in connection with the 2004 Equatorial Guinea coup attempt.
[20] On 24 November 2004, the Cape Town High Court upheld a subpoena from the South African Justice Ministry that required him to answer under oath questions from Equatorial Guinean authorities regarding the alleged coup attempt.
He was due to face questioning on 25 November 2004, regarding offences under the South African Foreign Military Assistance Act; these proceedings were later postponed until 8 April 2005.
An advisor to Equatorial Guinea's President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo told the BBC's Focus on Africa television programme that: "We are confident that justice has been done", and did not indicate that the country would seek Thatcher's extradition.
[18] During his trial in Equatorial Guinea in June 2008 Simon Mann said that Thatcher "was not just an investor, he came completely on board and became a part of the management team" of the coup plot.
His wife moved back to the United States with their children, the same year that he pleaded guilty in relation to an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea.
[25] Following his guilty plea and his divorce, he left South Africa in 2005 for Monaco on a one-year temporary residency permit, while his wife and children returned to the United States.
[32] Thatcher is entitled the usage of the pre-nominal style "The Honourable" following the elevation of his mother to the peerage as a baroness in 1992; he shares this courtesy with his twin sister, Carol.