The first volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher was published on Tuesday. Since Lady Thatcher had stipulated that the book could appear only after her death, we were, in principle, ready. But it is still a huge undertaking to finish correcting a 900-page book on a Tuesday (the day before the funeral), and get back the printed book the following Monday. Reviewing my endnotes, I came across an interviewee called Rosie Cruikshank. She appeared in relation to Margaret Roberts’s most serious boyfriend. Who on earth was she? Just in time, I remembered. While writing all the ‘love interest’ passages, I had worried that they might fall into the wrong hands, and so I gave the characters pseudonyms. I chose names to fit the period. Thus the first boyfriend, Tony Bray, was called Arthur Negus, after the antiques expert on the BBC’s Going for a Song. Robert Henderson, the Scottish doctor whom she met in Dartford at roughly the time that she first met Denis Thatcher, was named Andrew Cruikshank, after the actor in Dr Finlay’s Casebook. ‘Rosie Cruikshank’ was really Josie Henderson, the woman Robert later married. I discovered her, by then an elderly widow, living ten miles from us. She is now dead. Thank goodness, I managed, just, to ensure that she appears correctly in history.
There was also a startling late entry for the book. On the day after Lady Thatcher died, I received an email from Haden Blatch. Mr Blatch’s father, Bertie, was the chairman of the Finchley Conservative Association when it selected her in 1958. I had asked Haden for information before, but he had not got round to it. Now he revealed that his father had come home from the Finchley selection meeting and explained that Mrs Thatcher had not really won the vote. Her rival, Thomas Langton, had just pipped her.
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