The Spectator’s Notes | 18 April 2013

When Winston Churchill died, Lady Violet Bonham Carter made her maiden speech in the House of Lords. ‘It is hard for us to realise,’ she said, ‘that that indomitable heart to which we all owe our freedom … has fought its last long battle and is still.’ Her words have application to Margaret Thatcher. But something else about them strikes me. Lady Violet was the daughter of a prime minister (Asquith). Before Churchill married, nearly 60 years earlier, she had been, more or less, his girlfriend. It is a reminder that Churchill was, from the first, in the circles of power and privilege. This does not lessen his achievement, but it points up what Mrs Thatcher had to fight for that he did not. She had to struggle even to enter, let alone to dominate, those circles. He was born in Blenheim Palace, she over a grocer’s shop. When she died, she had no former boyfriend in the Lords to remember her youth.