Charming Thatcher Anecdote

For about the last three hundred years I have been reading a book about the English Civil War, which I chose because I was never taught anything about that time and wanted to know more. It is rather enormous and the whole period is complex to say the least. Because it is hard to follow a simple line through the various tustles, I find myself getting distracted by the many extraordinary personalities who emerge, bob along in the stormy waters and then vanish, usually due to the fact that they have had their heads chopped off or been skewered on a battlefield.

One of the people who caught my attention as I read was Thomas Wentworth, a prominent figure in the early years of the chaos. Wanting to know more, I discovered on the site called Internet Archive a book about him by a writer called CV Wedgwood. I've been enjoying reading it for a while now, but in typical fashion I've allowed myself to get yet further distracted by trying to find out who CV Wedgwood was - this could go on and on; once having found who she is, I'll want to know who the person was who wrote about her, and then where it will all end I have no idea.

Anyway, as is obvious from the above paragraph, CV Wedgwood turned out to be a woman. Her name in fact was Veronica, not much chosen these days - and the only person I know for whom it was chosen publicly stripped herself of it in favour of Ronnie. But - what a surprise - I digress.

Veronica Wedgwood, it turns out, had a female lover called Jacqueline Hope-Wallace, with whom she shared her life for many, many years. Naturally, I decided I wanted to know more about Miss Hope-Wallace and soon discovered that she was a very capable and successful civil servant who at one time worked for Margaret Thatcher when Thatcher was Minister for Pensions.

And at last we get to the point of this blog post - the article I found about Jacqueline Hope-Wallace included this anecdote, contributed by Alexander Chancellor, editor of the Spectator between 1975 and 1984, which I thought so nice that I would share it here:

"On Easter Monday, a beautiful spring day, [Lord] Alexander Hesketh brought Margaret and Denis Thatcher over [from Easton Neston] to my house at Stoke Park, where she said another surprising thing to me. Staying there with my late uncle Robin was Jacqueline Hope-Wallace, a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher, having once served under her as a civil servant in the Ministry of Pensions in the early 1960s, who was feeling bereft after the death of her long-term friend C.V. (Veronica) Wedgwood, the historian. I didn't mention that they had been lovers but must have somehow implied it, for Lady Thatcher grasped the point immediately and said, as a very modern person might, "I didn't realise they were partners." When they eventually crossed paths on the lawn, Hope-Wallace started to say "You won't remember me, but .." when Lady Thatcher briskly interrupted her: "Of course I remember you - you wrote that marvellous report on pension reform ..". She went on to recall the names and personalities of all the other civil servants in that department. She thus made a forlorn old lady very happy. Ted Heath would never have managed that."