Thatcher ‘nagged’ Major every day
My sex pest ordeal with Lloyd George, by Baroness of 95
VETERAN Tory peer Baroness Trumpington has revealed that dealing with Westminster sex pests is nothing new.
The 95-year-old said yesterday that she had suffered the advances of former prime minister David Lloyd George.
The philandering Liberal politician, known as the “Welsh goat”, had designs on the baroness when she was a 17-year-old land girl working on his farm in Churt, Surrey, during the Second World War.
As guest editor of Radio 4’s Today programme, Lady Trumpington, who once gave a former minister the V-sign in the House of Lords, showed she had lost none of her penchant for shocking people by telling presenter John Humphrys that Lloyd George, Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, liked to survey “pretty well all” of her body with a tape measure.
Slapped
“He liked measuring me,” she said. “In other words, he’d say, ‘Go and stand over there’. He had a tape measure and he would measure me.”
Humphrys said the encounters sounded “rather intimate”, to which the baroness replied: “It was. But I thought that’s what people do.”
Reflecting on the prospect of a modern Premier behaving in such a way, she added: “The Prime Minister would be booted, wouldn’t he?”
Asked whether she had ever slapped Lloyd George, Lady Trumpington, who later worked as a code breaker at Bletchley Park, replied: “No. I said thank you very much.”
She recalled how she also had her eyes opened to what was arguably the most notorious of Lloyd George’s sexual indiscretions in a career which MARGARET Thatcher used daily phone calls to nag her successor John Major, a Tory peer has revealed.
Official papers released this week showed how the former premier tore into her protege’s handling of the economy and government.
The files disclosed how relations between the two quickly soured after Mr Major entered Number 10 following Mrs Thatcher’s resignation in November 1990, as she accused him of trying to ditch her legacy.
Yesterday Baroness Trumpington, a minister in the Thatcher and Major governments, disclosed her knowledge of the bad blood during a chat on Radio 4’s Today saw him seduce a number of women, including the wives of two fellow Liberal MPs.
His secretary and long-term mistress Frances Stevenson was installed in a cottage he built for her on the farm “and when the family left, she went up to the big house”. programme. Asked if there was a single characteristic needed to be Prime Minister, Lady Trumpington said: “No. It’s the luck of the draw. Who would have thought John Major would ever be Prime Minister?”
Dreadful
Reminded of the joke that he “rose without trace”, she said: “Absolutely.”
She said: “He used to ring me up and say that he was having such a ghastly time because Margaret Thatcher drove him mad by ringing him up every day and telling him what to do.” But Lady Trumpington refused to identify any Prime Minister she had known who should not have had the job.
Asked to name the most effective, she said: “Sometimes Margaret Thatcher was great. At other times she was dreadful.”
Other papers released from the National Archives said that Mrs Thatcher was warned not to allow Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe into a crunch meeting over Britain’s EU rebate in 1987 for fear the would be too soft.
Mrs Thatcher won a tough fight in 1984 at the Fontainebleau summit in France for a rebate then worth about £600million-ayear. Fewer than three years after she secured the return of funds to the UK, the then European Commission president Jacques Delors was warning that Britain could not retain the concession.
Documents show that Mrs Thatcher was regarded by advisers as the only British politician tough enough to stand up to him.
Her foreign policy adviser Charles Powell counselled her not to allow Sir Geoffrey to attend the encounter as he might “try to soften the blows”.
He wrote: “You will want to leave Delors in no doubt that you intend to pursue a very tough line on all this.”