'This will be a tough and tearful week': Carol

LONDON: Margaret Thatcher's daughter Carol said on Saturday that she was expecting a "tough and tearful week" ahead of her mother's high-profile funeral on Wednesday.

"I would just like to say that I feel like anyone else who has just lost a second parent," Carol Thatcher said in a statement to journalists outside her mother's former home in London.

"It's a deeply sad and rather thought-provoking landmark in life."

Margaret Thatcher, Britain's only female prime minister who was in power from 1979 to 1990, died of a stroke on Monday. She was 87.

Carol Thatcher, a 59-year-old journalist, said the "magnificent" tributes to her mother from world leaders were evidence of the mark she had made on the world as Britain's longest-ruling 20th century premier.

More than 2,000 political figures, celebrities and friends of the Iron Lady are due to attend her ceremonial funeral at St Paul's Cathedral in London on Wednesday.

"My mother once said to me, 'Carol, I think my place in history is assured.' The magnificent tributes this week from the wonderful words of President Obama to others from colleagues who once worked alongside her have proved her right," she said.

"An enormous personal thank you to those who have sent me messages of sympathy and support these have given me strength. "But I know that this is going to be a tough and tearful week, even for the daughter of the Iron Lady."

Dressed in black, Carol posed with her twin brother Mark for photographs at the door of her mother's home in London's upmarket Belgravia district.

In a statement outside the house last Wednesday, Mark Thatcher said the family had been "overwhelmed" by the tributes to his mother, who he said would have been "greatly honoured" by the presence of Queen Elizabeth II at her funeral.

Supporters have been leaving flowers and cards by Thatcher's doorstep.

But the Iron Lady has proved as divisive in death as she was in life, and London police were bracing on Saturday for a mass "party" celebrating her death.

Some 1,500 of her critics who say she ruined millions of lives with her free-market reforms were planning to attend the party in London's Trafalgar Square, according to the event's Facebook page.