‘Are you going out tonight, Frasier? If you are, don’t leave without me’

An hour earlier I had stepped off a plane from Dublin and I was three-quarters deaf in one ear. I had a drink in the bar at Boisdales Canary Wharf and a gander at the seating plan. Fourteen to a table. I was on table 18. I went up the stairs. Only one person was already in place: a poised woman wearing a three-string pearl necklace. Everyone else must have been finishing their cigars on the terrace. My name card placed me beside her. I put my complimentary five-pack of hand-rolled cigars on the table, plonked myself down, and said, ‘Hallo, I’m Jeremy.’ ‘Jean. Jean Trumpington,’ she said. ‘Do you smoke cigars, Jean?’ I said. ‘The last time I smoked a cigar was behind a cowshed in East Kent,’ she said. ‘And that was many, many years ago.’ Further conversation revealed the startling fact that she was Baroness Trumpington, agriculture minister in Lady Thatcher’s government.