‘Her last letter said I was a wonderful son’
This week, Baroness Trumpington sadly died, aged 96. Here, her only son speaks to Joe Shute about her remarkable life
Baroness Trumpington will not go gentle into that good night. Rather, she will depart this earth today to the jaunty strains of Chattanooga Choo Choo. A private family service in honour of the 96-year-old, who died on Monday, will be held this morning at a west London crematorium. Typically, she has kept a firm hand on proceedings, requesting her funeral should feature the big band song recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1941.
She previously chose the record as one of her Desert Island Discs and, well into her 80s, belted it out at a parliamentary charity concert in a scarlet dress and floppy widebrimmed hat.
“She loved it because it was jolly, and equally she wanted her funeral to be a happy occasion,” recalls her son, Adam Barker.
Like the fictional choo choo steaming from New York’s Pennsylvania Station, Jean Trumpington was always a woman going places. Her death has left a void in British public life.
A former Land Girl and Bletchley Park codebreaker, at 69 she was appointed the oldest ever female minister and remained in office until the age of 75 In the Lords, where she sat until 2017, she was formidable – statuesque in pearls and fierce enough for peers to curtail their speeches so she could nip out for one of her many cigarette breaks.
Shortly after her 90th birthday, she became the oldest panellist ever to appear on Have I Got News For You and in 2012 she discovered internet fame after being caught flicking a V-sign to Lord King of Bridgwater when he referred to her as looking “pretty old”.
That defiant Churchillian image has been circulated endlessly this week, as the nation mourns a woman who straddled so many key events of the past century and was on firstname terms with so many of its key protagonists. Even the Prince of Wales was a visitor to her Chelsea care home in the final months of her life.
“She could be bloody difficult, but people forgave her that,” Barker, 63, says in his first newspaper interview since her death. “I don’t think you can think of your mother as a national icon. She was my mum. She took care of me.”
We meet outside Baroness Trumpington’s flat in a Victorian mansion block overlooking Battersea Park. Barker, an only child who inherited his late mother’s warm smile, arrives in a taxi straight from the care home, laden with her possessions. A scarlet House of Lords cushion pokes out the top of a trolley bag, while I am handed a lead-lined ministerial suitcase embossed with “Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health and Social Security” – the position she held from 1985 to 1987, during the Thatcher government.
Inside, past the small front garden she lovingly tended for 30 years, is a treasure trove of memorabilia. There are framed photographs of Baroness Trumpington alongside the Queen, Baroness Thatcher, Sir John Major and David Lloyd George, whom she met during the Second World War working as a Land Girl on his estate at Churt, Surrey, where she found herself required to fend off his amorous advances.
On her coffee table, rests a parliamentary pass valid until October 2022 – by which time she would have been 100.
“She didn’t believe in retirement,” says Barker, a lawyer and father of two children, Gigi, 31 and Christopher, 29. During his mother’s later years, Barker devoted much of his time to looking after her, which led them to become “really close in the past 10 years,” he says. “She adored me and I adored her.”
Trumpers, as she came to be known, was born Jean Alys Campbell-harris. Barker always knew his mother as Alys, and it was how she signed her last letter to him. “She said I had been a wonderful son,” he says.
Growing up, Barker had no idea about his mother’s wartime service. “She said nothing about it,” he recalls.
After the war, she was dispatched by the Foreign Office to Paris to help with the effort of rebuilding France. In 1952, she moved to work for an advertising agency in New York, where she threw herself into the glamorous social whirl.
There, she met a young Cambridge don, Alan Barker, a former cavalry officer who had been wounded in Normandy. They married in 1954 and returned to England, where he became headmaster of the Leys School in Cambridge in 1958.
Barker says his parents had hoped for another child, but it was not to be. As a result, his mother doted upon him. “A few of her friends said my father was a little jealous of me when I was growing up because of the attention,” he says.
When, aged 14, he and some friends raided the family drinks cabinet and ended up being stopped by the police on the way to Canterbury, his father was furious, his mother rather proud. “My father was the serious brilliant academic,” he says. “She would just bring joy to a room.”
She was fierce enough for peers to curtail speeches for her many cigarettes
It was at Cambridge where she embarked on her political career, becoming mayor of the city and the first woman to be elected president of the Cambridge Conservative Association.
Not long after she was created a life peer in 1980, her husband suffered a debilitating stroke. After much agonising, it was decided he would stay in the family home in Sandwich, Kent, while during the week Baroness Trumpington would remain working in London. “There wasn’t any resentment on his part,” Barker, whose father died in 1988, insists. “Only frustration.”
As we are speaking, Baroness Trumpington’s grandson, Christopher, wanders into the flat. He appeared on the Today programme when she was a guest editor last year, talking about his struggles with Crohn’s disease; his grandmother, he admits, was “quite intimidating” – in fact the family were relieved that her fading eyesight meant she couldn’t spot his extensive tattoos.
“Her honesty was refreshing and appreciated by my generation, who are accustomed to politicians who say a lot but don’t mean anything,” he says.
There are countless examples of such forthrightness, and her life advice to her son was “always be true to yourself ”. Barker recalls that his mother was first invited on to Have I Got News For You after the death of Baroness Thatcher in 2013; after being made up on set, she realised the intention of the show was to lay into her former friend. She walked off before the cameras started rolling, and was hastily replaced by Ken Livingstone.
Even well into her 90s, her health remained remarkably robust. She fought off oesophagal cancer a few years ago – although it was enough to prompt her to give up her once 80-a-day habit – and continued to enjoy the odd tipple. But after she retired from the Lords, Barker says, her decline was swift.
She was bed-ridden for her final few months, with care home staff reading newspaper articles to her. She remained sufficiently politically engaged to be horrified at the Conservative Party tearing itself apart over Europe.
“She was very much depressed about certain things going on,” he adds. “Despite the view she was a Brexit lady, she was absolutely not.”
Her final public engagement came just two weeks before her death, when a French delegation visited the care home to present the Légion d’honneur in recognition of her wartime service.
Barker shows me a video of the ceremony on his mobile phone. Baroness Trumpington appears weakened, lying in bed, but her sense of duty prevails. “I am thrilled to be receiving it,” she says, mustering the voice that dominated British public life for so long. “Thank you again. And thank you, all of you, for coming.”