Daddy’s girl The tragic downfall of Mary Parkinson
Scandal ended the career of her father Cecil Parkinson, but what effect did it have on Mary? Peter Stanford reports
In the photograph, they look like the perfect family. It is November 1970 and the debonair Cecil Parkinson, self-made millionaire and Tory victor in the Enfield West by-election, is striding in through the gates of the House of Commons to take his seat. He is accompanied by his wife, Ann, elegant in a well-cut suit and fur hat, and – in matching dresses – their three daughters, Joanna, Emma and Mary, who, at 10, was the oldest and is holding hands with her parents.
At the time, all aspiring politicians wanted to project the image of the reliable family man, someone voters could trust, and Cecil Parkinson had it down to a tee. It helped fuel his rapid rise through the ranks to be the party chairman, who delivered a landslide victory for Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 general election.
As his reward, she planned to make her blue-eyed boy foreign secretary, and perhaps even her anoint him her successor… but then it was revealed that he had been having a 12-year affair with his secretary, Sara Keays, 16 years his junior. He had even promised to marry her. When Keays told him she was pregnant, he urged her to have an abortion. She refused, and he turned his back on her.
In December 1983, she gave birth to their daughter, Flora. The carefullycultivated image was well and truly shattered and, though his marriage survived and he returned after a period in the wilderness to Cabinet office under John Major, Parkinson never again reached the dizzy heights before he died last year of cancer.
But he was not the only one to pay a price, as the death this week of his daughter, Mary, at the age of 57, has reminded us. “Stick thin and very frail” when her body was found on Sunday at her home in south London where she lived alone, Mary’s friends report that her battle with drug addiction and depression had ended in suicide.
The bright-eyed schoolgirl, caught on film in 1970, enjoyed every advantage: good schools, skiing holidays, her own pony. But by the age of 14, she had been diagnosed with anorexia.
As her father took his place round the Cabinet table, she was at university getting mixed up in hard drugs, and went on, according to reports, to end up as a cocaine addict, living in a west London crack house.
Such tragedies, of course, happen to plenty of non-politicians’ children, and shouldn’t be blamed on the parents – but Mary herself did point a specific finger of accusation at her
‘He had never known failure in his life. The pressure on me was too much’
father in 1987, as she left court after being convicted of drug possession. “He used to get really angry with me,” she told journalists, “because he had never known failure in his life. The pressure on me was too much, and I just cracked.”
Mary managed to kick the habit in 1990, and went on to join forces with her mother, Ann, in setting up the charity Action on Addiction.
“I was portrayed in the press as being this wondrous person who was spending her life saving other desperate drug addicts,” she said in an interview. “I believed all that nonsense and I felt I had to be an angel.”
She wasn’t the only politician’s child to suffer. Another Thatcher favourite, Michael (now Lord) Forsyth, saw his son Nicholas expelled from his private Scottish boarding school in 1994 with the words of the head teacher widely reported: “The boy has a very tough time ahead of him. Having a famous father is not easy for him.”
Mark Thatcher was another who wilted under the pressure, getting himself lost in the Sahara Desert and then tangled up with controversial business dealings in Africa, while the Blairs’ son, Euan, found himself in an unwanted spotlight in 2000 when, just 16, he was arrested for being drunk and incapable. It came only days after his father, then prime minister, had been condemning drunken louts.
“It is a high-pressure life for any senior politician’s children,” acknowledges Sir Anthony Seldon, the historian and educationist, who is currently working on a book on life after 10 Downing Street for its resident families.
“The politician parent will be absent for long periods, and distracted even when at home. That impacts on the harmony between their mother and father and, for a sensitive child, can make them feel, often in subconscious way, that they have to find a way of emulating their famous parent.” Three of Winston Churchill’s four surviving children, he points out, “had significant problems coping with life”.
His eldest daughter, Diana, committed suicide in 1963, aged 54.
If you then add the element of scandal, Sir Anthony explains, it can all too easily become toxic.
“What gives you a sense of a validation, that it is all worth it, is the sense that you are making a contribution to a bigger cause, ‘to the country’. Yet, when that moral purpose is shattered by the taint of dishonour, it can be unbearable for those with a fragile ego.”
If Mary Parkinson’s tragic death was in some measure bound up with her well-known father’s spectacular rise and fall, then so too is the life of her half-sister, Flora Keays, now 33.
Where Mary seemed to be endlessly struggling to escape from the shadow of her father, Flora never even met him. Not only did he not once send her a birthday or Christmas card, in 1992 he obtained a gagging order to prevent anything being reported about the child who so closely resembles him until she was 18.
Earlier this year, in a joint interview for this paper with her mother, Flora sounded remarkably sanguine about her father’s complete absence from her life. “I feel that he has really lost out. If I hadn’t had a disability, maybe he would have wanted to be involved in my life.”
She lives in a small 17th-century house in the Gloucestershire countryside with her mother who, Mary Parkinson made a point of saying publicly, has done “a brilliant job” in raising her. Flora rides horses, does ballet and is a talented artist, but cannot live independently. As a toddler, she had a five-hour brain operation to tackle her epilepsy, which left her with learning difficulties, and she was subsequently diagnosed with Asperger’s.
Over the years, Cecil Parkinson did make some financial provision for her – initially £3,000 per annum, rising to £20,000 in 1998 – but Sara Keays had to take him to court to get the payments increased to meet Flora’s complex needs. In his will, he left his fortune in a trust for his wife and their three daughters. There was no mention of Flora.
With maintenance payments stopped after his death, Sara once more returned to court, when she could no longer pay her mortgage to seek some form of support from Parkinson’s estate. The fallout of the scandal continues to blight all their lives. But what of others who have had similar upbringings to Mary Parkinson?
“If your parents’ marriage is stable and loving, it helps you enormously in dealing with the challenges of being a politician’s child,” says one offspring of a former Cabinet minister from the Parkinson era, who asked not to be identified. “There are undoubtedly privileges that come with that life. You see a lot of things that other children your age don’t see, and meet people they don’t meet, but I remember so clearly, even from a young age, the pressures – such as always having to check the car for IRA bombs, or knowing that if I stepped out of line at my school, there was a good chance it would end up in the papers. I have children now and wouldn’t want them under that kind of scrutiny.”
The same thought is what drives some politicians to abandon Westminster. In a recent interview, Ruth Kelly, Labour’s former education secretary, described why she quit Parliament in 2010: “I wanted my family left alone. There were all sorts of incidents where the press would gather outside our house and my four young children had to walk through them. These things take their toll.”
On both the parents and the children. But as an occupational hazard, it is not inevitable. Mary Parkinson was the first to point out that her two sisters emerged comparatively unscathed from the same upbringing.
And perhaps another thing has shifted. The suffering of those offspring who did get damaged, has encouraged today’s generations of front-line politicians finally to realise that parading their children in front of the cameras to woo voters can come at too high a price.
‘I remember so clearly the pressures – having to check the car for IRA bombs’