Trumpers made the House of Lords fun

each other”.) She later lobbied successfully for her former colleague Alan Turing to receive a posthumous royal pardon. After the war came a spell as a New York socialite before returning to England to marry William Barker. As he followed a career in teaching (Douglas Hurd was one of his pupils) she started out in politics, becoming a Cambridge councillor in the 1960s and then mayor in the early 1970s. She was ennobled by Margaret Thatcher in 1980 as Baroness Trumpington of Sandwich in the County of Kent (“The name made no sense but was a quite deliberate combination of the two places I considered home,” she said). It also earned her the nickname “Trumpers”.

Her first ministerial job was at the Department of Health although she didn’t always enjoy it, later recalling: “I found it very hard to deal with Edwina Currie. What a b **** !” She was the oldest female minister ever, serving as minister of state for agriculture until 1992 when she was 69, worked as a formidable government whip and had two stints as a baroness-in-waiting to the Queen although she once confessed: “I never know what to say to her – you can’t just dive in and talk about racing straightaway.”

Among the time-servers and nonentities crammed on the Lords benches Baroness Trumpington stood out not just for her humour but for her life experience, work ethic and sense of duty. Without her Westminster will not just be a duller place, it will be a less effective one too.