The Spectator’s Notes | 25 April 2013

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.