A new book has suggested that Margaret Thatcher had extramarital affairs. It’s a remarkable attempt to puncture the late Prime Minister’s carapace of bourgeois morality on her centenary, and has more than a whiff of Tory prurience about it.
The book, The Incidental Feminist by journalist Tina Gaudoin, really contains one and a half allegations.
The first allegation, and the only one put with any firmness, is that Thatcher had an affair with Sir Humphrey Atkins at some time in her early parliamentary career (that is, from her election in 1959 until her appointment as a shadow cabinet minister in 1967).
Here is the relevant passage from Gaudoin’s book:
Whilst many were willing to speculate, no one was prepared to go on the record. Except for Jonathan Aitken. ‘Yes, I think she did have at least one affair very early on in her parliamentary career,’ he says during our interview, ‘but I can’t for the life of me remember who it was – he was very boring, that’s all I do remember.’ And later? I float a name I’ve been given: Sir Humphrey Atkins? Aitken’s eyes flicker. ‘Quite possibly – there were knowledgeable rumours to that effect at the time. His good looks must have appealed to her, but his political brain was hopeless.
So this is based on the uncertain testimony, after prompting, of a former Tory MP who on his own website describes himself as having “one of the most… colourful careers in British public life”. Aitken was also an ex-boyfriend of Carol Thatcher who was kept on the backbenches throughout Mrs T’s years in office.
The Hitch understands that the Atkins family have been batting this rumour away for years.
One of Gaudoin’s other sources told her: “The joke about Atkins was that for someone who was not very good, he kept getting promoted. Now why was that?”
Lord Moore even came across it during his researches for the authorised biography. He told the Hitch: “It’s not completely new to me. I heard it as a very vague rumour, one of those things people say with a drink when they know nothing about it. I have no reason to believe the claim and no actual evidence has been produced.”
The additional half-allegation relates to the PR executive Tim Bell. Bell is one of the creative trio – along with the playwright Ronald Millar and the TV producer Gordon Reece – who created the Thatcher image, voice and brand. It is little more than a passing suggestion in the book.
Gaudoin again:
Tim Bell merits another mention (although he has been previously discussed) because several interviewees were clear that he and MT had a fairly unusual extracurricular ‘friendship’, which involved Bell placing his hand on her knee under dinner tables across the capital and more. My Journalism 101 interrogative of ‘How do you know this?’ was always met with the same response: ‘Because he told me.’
An additional fact about Bell: he was fined £50 for indecent exposure in the 1970s after masturbating in his window while woman passed by on the street. Whatever this was, it wasn’t Anthony and Cleopatra.
Bell wasn’t the only man who had fantasies about Thatcher. Francois Mitterand said of her: “She has the eyes of Caligula but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.”
The appetite for scandal about ex-prime ministers is strong. Last year Patrick Maguire of the Times, formerly of this parish, reported a No 10 affair involving Harold Wilson. The sources were Wilson’s own advisers, who volunteered a name (Janet Hewlett-Davies). And it wasn’t the name that had been doing rounds on the cocktail circuit since (Marcia Falkender). That had credibility. Does this?
[Further reading: Thatcher-land]
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