Sex and Margaret Thatcher

My last column discussed Lady Thatcher and drink. It is now time to move on to sex. But there is little to say. Hard as it may be for moderns to contemplate, she was uxorious. A million years ago, in her days in opposition, I was in the House having  a drink with an elderly Tory MP when she swept past. His already rheumy voice thickened with sentiment. ‘Ishn’t she a lovely little thing,’ he mused (not quite how I would have described the leader of our party). ‘But you should have sheen her when she first arrived. Oh, she was sho beautiful. We all tried to [have our wicked way with] her. None of us got anywhere.’ Back in 1959, when the competition was Bessie Braddock and Dame Irene Ward, she must indeed have looked like a film star.

Properly behaved herself, she was tolerant of others’ lapses, if sometimes a little naive.