What Lord Butler saw: Carol Thatcher in a cupboard at No 10

MARGARET THATCHER once hid her daughter Carol in a cupboard for wearing jeans at Downing Street.

The prime minister ordered Carol to hide when Lord Butler, her principal private secretary, came to the flat above No 10 on official business. “I have a vivid memory of going up to the flat and into the sitting room to discuss some point with Margaret Thatcher and in the course of our discussions I heard a rustling in a cupboard,” he recalled.

“I said, ‘What is that? Are there mice up here?’ And she said, ‘No, that’s Carol.’ I said, ‘Why is Carol in that cupboard?’ And she said, ‘Well, you know, she was wearing jeans so I told her to hide herself while you were coming in.”

Lord Butler shares his memories in Monday’s episode of the BBC Two documentary Thatcher: A Very British Revolution. The episode intertwines her political and domestic life at No10 as she brought up Carol and Mark, while holding down the top job. It includes her 1985 interview with Miriam Stoppard in which she said of the twins: “They arrived and they were very small and they needed a lot of looking after. And you do change when you have had children. I remember thinking, if I’m not careful, I’m never going to make an effort to get back to intellectual pursuits, I’m just going to be so overcome with this. And I really ought to be able to do both. It was a conscious decision that I must look after the children and do something else as well.”

However, Lord Powell, her private secretary, claims she had not been a good mother. “The challenges of being a mother and prime minister were considerable and, to be perfectly frank, she rather failed. She didn’t have time enough for her children. She rather over-indulged Mark when she perhaps under-indulged Carol.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Jonathan Aitken discloses his role in how Mrs Thatcher came to be known as TBW – “that bloody woman”.