The Spectator’s Notes | 11 December 2004

Muriel Cullen, who died last week, aged 83, was the elder and only sister of Margaret Thatcher. Living happily with her husband on his well-run farm in Essex, she showed not the slightest desire to be famous. I found her fascinating, though. In the course of my work on the life of Lady Thatcher, I visited Mrs Cullen and interviewed her. Although by then in poor health, she was every inch the daughter of Alderman Roberts, grocer and Mayor of Grantham. Like her sister, she would listen half-intently, half-impatiently to any question with her head held high and slightly on one side, in the fashion of a bird. She had good bones and was carefully dressed, a very strong woman and, I should think, a brave one. Her answers were, to put it mildly, crisp. Sometimes, she would suddenly say things like, ‘That’s enough of that. Let’s change the subject.’ The relation between the sisters reminded me of those bits in the Sherlock Holmes stories in which Sherlock’s brother Mycroft appears. Mycroft, it turns out, is even more brilliant than the famous detective, but has no inclination to pursue the thing full-time. He is occasionally enlisted to solve a really knotty problem. ‘Oh, my mother’s a good deal bossier than Margaret,’ Jane Cullen told me with amusement, and her brother Andrew said, ‘Of course, we love Aunty Margaret to bits; but we’re more right-wing than she is.’ I enjoyed finding another iron lady, but one who chose to live quietly under the broad East Anglian sky. For Margaret, it means the loss of her last real link with her childhood.

It is funny what sorts of insults you can get away with in our culture. George Galloway, who won his libel action against the Daily Telegraph last week, said that we were ‘sniggering public schoolboys’, and nobody reprimanded him; but if we had attacked him for his childhood in a Dundee tenement we would, quite rightly, have been excoriated.