London: The Telegraph was forced to shut its reader comments facility on all stories about Margaret Thatcher after being flooded with abuse about the former prime minister when she died on Monday.

Tony Gallagher, the editor of the Telegraph, said that even the newspaper’s email address for reader tributes was “filled with abuse” and it decided to close the comments down.

The paper, which traditionally supports the Tory party and was edited by the former Conservative cabinet minister Bill Deedes during seven of the eleven and a half years of Thatcher’s reign, was singled out for abuse on Monday by Thatcher critics. “We have closed comments on every #Thatcher story today - even our address to email tributes is filled with abuse,” Gallagher tweeted. “Many of the people blocked from comments on our #ThatcherCoverage appear to have clogged up my timeline with their foul abuse.”

In an exchange with the Guardian’s Spanish football correspondent Sid Lowe Gallagher complained “comments too often a horror show”.

Insiders on the paper say the comments were particularly abusive and personal towards Thatcher.

Meanwhile. a Taiwanese cable news channel apologised Tuesday for running a photo of Queen Elizabeth II when reporting the death of Margaret Thatcher, while a Thai station showed a photo of actress Meryl Streep, AFP reported.

Taiwan’s CTI TV, in footage Monday night, showed the queen dressed in a green coat and waving at the crowd with a caption reading “Former British prime minister Thatcher passed away, the Iron Lady is missed”.

In Thailand, army-run Channel 5 TV station also apologised after it showed a photo of Streep playing Thatcher in the 2011 semi-biographical film “The Iron Lady” during its report on the death of the former premier.

“We apologise for the mistake over the use of the photo during the report on Margaret Thatcher which caused misunderstanding. Our team will try harder and be more careful,” it wrote on its official Facebook page.

A source at the channel said the job of finding the picture had been outsourced to another company.

“The news anchor noticed the mistake and solved the problem by saying her story was made into a Hollywood movie played by Meryl Streep,” he said.

Thatcher, dubbed the “Iron Lady,” died of a stroke on Monday in London aged 87.