Journalist and broadcaster Carol Thatcher displayed nerves of steel last week as she steered a jeep along a makeshift canopy bridge 100ft above the Australian jungle. Before she could finish her challenge on ITV's I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!, the car had plunged off the track and she was left dangling in her harness. For once, those impossibly smug Geordie chipmunks, Ant and Dec, looked ashen. But the daughter of Baroness Thatcher simply brushed herself down and apologised for damaging the car. Later, she quipped: 'I should have brought my chauffeur.'
A superstar was born. The Daily Mail christened her the new Bridget Jones (in Bigger Pants). The People urged its readers to vote for her rather than nubile soap star, Kimberley Davies, while the Mirror ran the headline 'Vote Thatcher: I bet You Never Thought You'd Read That in the Mirror'. And yet 'Thatch', as she dubs herself, is an unlikely icon. Posh, the wrong side of 50, she spends most of her time on the slopes at Klosters.
But even her mother's fiercest detractors don't have a bad word to say about Carol, who has survived an Iron Lady for a mother, a father satirised as a gin-swilling, golf-playing buffoon and a twin brother who was recently placed under house arrest after he bankrolled an attempted coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. Never mind embarking on one of the most hazardous careers available to the child of a Prime Minister - journalism.
'You need quite good shock absorbers and a sense of humour to be the Prime Minister's child,' Carol once wrote. Unsurprisingly, she didn't tell her mother she was going on the programme: 'She'll probably be very critical. It's not her sort of show, so I might just tell her I've done it when I get back.'
I'm a Celebrity..., the nation's favourite reality pantomime, is cast with meticulous care. Everyone has their appointed role - principal boy, blonde totty, villain, ugly older sister and so on. But like Janet Street-Porter and Christine Hamilton, who appeared in previous series, Thatch has proved you shouldn't underestimate the mature bird.
Carol is jaunty, decent, self-deprecating and, when she remembers to brush her hair, oddly sexy. 'I'm so delighted because it shows her at her very best,' says Linda McDougall, who produced Carol's 2002 documentary about her father, Married to Maggie, for Channel 4 'I love her to bits; she's one of the nicest, funniest people I've ever met. She looks truly happy in the jungle. She's spent an awful lot of her time travelling on her own, so you sense she's in her element.'
'She likes to be part of a community,' observes Lord Bell, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and a family friend, 'that's why she's doing so well. She's being herself, not putting on an act like some of the contestants.'
A childhood regime of emotional neglect, boarding school and outdoor sports has certainly prepared Carol for the social and physical rigours of the jungle. But what's surprising is the way the public have taken her to their hearts, not least for exposing our bodily frailties. After a terrifying parachute jump into the camp, she was violently sick over herself and her tandem skydiver. She accidentally bared a very English bottom climbing into her camp bed. And then we had Lavatorygate. It was late, Carol was exhausted and in no mood to trek to the outdoor dunny, so she simply rolled out of her hammock and squatted on the floor.
It sparked humorous public debate, but one senses Carol will be mortified when she sees the footage. 'There are two people there,' says her close friend Gabrielle Crawford, wife of actor Michael Crawford. 'There's the gentle and insecure person, who, at times, has been a very lost soul, and then there's the jolly Carol you see at your front door.'
Carol and her twin, Mark, were delivered by Caesarean section in August 1953 while their father watched a Test match at the Oval. From the beginning, her brother was the favoured child. 'He was always more glamorous,' she says. 'In comparison, I was one-dimensional and dull.' He continued to eclipse her.
'I noticed that when Mark arrived in London to visit his parents, Carol, who is warm, witty and great fun, seemed to retreat into a shell,' says McDougall.
Hers was a lonely childhood. With a mother climbing the political ladder and a father busy running a business, the children were left to a nanny. As Carol recalls: 'My mother was prone to calling me by her secretaries' names and working through each of them until she got to Carol.'
When she was nine, with her mother MP for Finchley, Carol was packed off to boarding school, eventually arranging her own transfer to the prestigious St Paul's School. After graduating in law from University College, London, she moved to Sydney to work as a journalist. By 1975, her mother was Tory leader. Calls home weren't exactly intimate, she told one journalist: 'After a lengthy spiel from my mother on the phone, telling me all about another history-making week she'd had, my news from Australia of the latest barbecue, recent work assignments or the state of the surf at Bondi didn't cut much ice.'
In the mid-1980, she returned to London and worked on the Daily Telegraph under editor Bill Deedes: 'She's a very gutsy, independent reporter, very good on travel and adventure. And yet she was cut off by quite a bit of the press who wouldn't run anything with Carol Thatcher's byline.' She also had to tread a tightrope with colleagues. 'I always had to think, "How would this be made to look in Private Eye?" I had to hope my fellow journalists wouldn't turn me in for drinking 11 pina coladas on a press trip.' When she was sacked from the Telegraph by the incoming editor Max Hastings, it made front-page news. Later, she worked on TVAM and Radio 4's Loose Ends
'She was never quite sure whether journalists were being friendly with her to find out secrets or whether they were actually interested in her,' says Lord Bell. 'But I don't think she let it affect her. She's a very bubbly, straightforward person, much nearer to her mother in image than people realise.'
For years, Carol had a difficult personal life, including an affair with Jonathan Aitken. When he ended it, Lady Thatcher is said to have remarked that she would be damned if she was going to give a job to a man 'who made Carol cry'.
These days, she is linked to a Swiss ski instructor, Marco Grass, who is 14 years her junior. Soon after she met him in 1992, she joked: 'One day, I'm sure he will vanish off into the distance with someone younger and prettier.' Today, he is said to share her home in the Swiss resort of Klosters and a penthouse in London. Although the flat is desirably located, Carol rents it out (she doesn't have a fixed income) and has a portable building on the roof to stay in when she is in London.
Like her father, Carol is not a political animal, preferring a drink and a game of tennis to intense discussion. She has always laughed off claims that she would marry and have children with Grass, adding: 'I like being permanently single. It suits me perfectly.'
More recently, when her mother complained about her 'lost' family (Mark in South Africa, Carol in Switzerland), her daughter was less than sympathetic: 'A mother cannot reasonably expect her grown-up children to boomerang back, gushing cosiness and make up for lost time. Absentee Mum, then Gran in overdrive is not an equation that balances.'
In 1996, Carol published a biography of her father, Below the Parapet, an attempt to cast off the Private Eye conceit that clung to Denis. Hailed as frank, touching and funny, the book became a bestseller, although Mrs Thatcher never read it.
Her relationship with her father, a distant, if genial, figure in childhood, blossomed. Shortly before he died, she interviewed him for Married to Maggie. According to psychologist Dorothy Rowe, it revealed the key to the Thatcher marriage: 'There are husbands who accept being sidelined like Denis Thatcher. His relationship was with his daughter. In that interview between him and Carol, what came through was a wonderful father/daughter relationship. A lot of men wouldn't want to walk away from that.'
The documentary also contained one of the last TV interviews with Margaret Thatcher. Later, McDougall wrote about how the former PM had seemed forgetful and disoriented during filming. The Tory mafia turned on Carol. 'There are what I call the keepers of the icon,' she says. 'Their self-appointed job seems to be to keep the icon of Lady Thatcher going and it bears zero relationship to Carol's life or what's really happening to Lady Thatcher, or even to reality itself.'
It has taken years for Carol to emerge from under the shadow of Downing Street. It looked like she would end up as the family ghostwriter (in addition to Denis's memoir, she has published biographies of tennis players John and Chris Lloyd and the QE2).
But now, in her early fifties, she is striking out on her own. On the basis of her current performance in the jungle, she could even end up with her own chat show. Last Thursday's dinner party, where she and wine writer Jilly Goolden ate trays of live grubs, was magnificently surreal. 'It's the best thing I've seen on TV for years,' laughs McDougall. 'She's much, much more entertaining than her father ever was. She's a unique, clever person and nobody ever knew it.'
Nothing, it seems, fazes Thatch. When perma-tanned David Dickinson asked whether she had ever been married, she observed dryly: 'No, no, darling, I don't do extremes of behaviour.'
Carol Thatcher
DoB: 15 August 1953
Jobs: Journalist, broadcaster, author
Education: St Paul's School, London; University College, London (law)
Family: Daughter of Baroness and Sir Denis Thatcher, brother of Mark; going out with ski instructor Marco Grass