Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Baroness Trumpington’s Me Too moment with ex-pm eighty years ago

It’s a privileged life. The other morning I had coffee in the River Room at the House of Lords with the redoubtable Jean Trumpington, 95, wartime Bletchley Park code-breaker, health minister under Margaret Thatcher, and the woman who notoriously gave a V-sign to a colleague in the Lords’ chamber and became an internet sensation as a consequence.

At my request, she sang to me: several of Charles Trenet’s hits (in impeccable French), some of Marlene Dietrich’s favourites (in excellent German) and the best of the Vera Lynn songbook.

She told wonderful stories, too: of being stuck in the lift at Ascot with the Queen, of what Her Majesty really thought of Margaret Thatcher, of what she herself thought of Mrs T – ‘Close-up, she was stunningly beautiful.’ She had tales of all the prime ministers she had known. ‘Winston Churchill was both fun and rather frightening. He loved animals. He liked to have animals all over his bed. Lloyd George, of course, liked to have girls all over his bed.’

How well had she known Lloyd George? ‘I was only fifteen when I met him. He had quite a reputation, as you know. It was at his farmhouse. He measured me – with a tape measure. It was a bit odd, but nothing happened.’

I told Baroness Trumpington my Lloyd George story. It was told to me many years ago by the veteran broadcaster Wynford Vaughan-thomas, who joined the BBC in the mid-1930s and, as a young reporter based in Cardiff, was sent to interview Lloyd George in the aftermath of the November 1935 general election.

Vaughan-thomas, carrying his recording equipment, arrived at the hotel where Lloyd George was staying, to be told by the landlord that the great man was expecting him. Thomas went up to the former prime minister’s room and knocked on the door.

‘Enter!’ called the unmistakable voice from within. Thomas entered and found Lloyd George sitting up in bed with a couple of young women, both topless, one on either side of him.

‘Unpack your equipment, boy,’ commanded Lloyd George. ‘Let’s get on with it.’ Thomas did as he was told, recorded his interview – ‘It was a good one’ – and departed. When he got back to the BBC, Vaughan-thomas reported what had happened to his boss.

‘Never mind that,’ he was told. ‘That’s none of the BBC’S business. Have you got the interview? That’s all we need.’

Apparently, it led the six o’clock news.

It’s a while since I’ve been to a big London theatre. The seats are so expensive and, unless you’re ready to fork out for the front stalls, the actors all seem a long way away. I prefer a small space, and in London that means I’m a regular at the Orange Tree in Richmond, the Finborough in Earl’s Court, and the Southwark Playhouse near the Elephant and Castle. At each of these theatres, you will find an impressive range of work and the highest production values at wonderfully accessible prices.

My West End favourite is the intimate Jermyn Street Theatre, founded in the 1990s in the basement of what was once the Monseigneur restaurant and nightclub, and managed from the start by Penny Horner, one of the unsung heroines of British theatre. Penny and her young artistic director, Tom Littler, are currently staging all nine of Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8.30 one-act plays, the first time they have been seen together in the West End since 1936.

The Jermyn Street’s last production was a double bill by Maureen Duffy, 84. She’s not only still with us but, judging from her new piece about St Hilda of Whitby (the woman who brought Christianity to the Anglo-saxons), she’s also still at the top of her game. The Hilda play was paired with an earlier Duffy drama about Virginia Woolf and both roles were played with extraordinary effect by one of my favourite actresses, Sarah Crowden.

Another of my favourite actresses is another Woolf authority, Dame Eileen Atkins, to whom I shall always be grateful because she introduced me to A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary by Virginia Woolf. It’s one of my favourite bedside books, alongside the diaries of Pepys, Chips Channon and Coward.

Dame Eileen said to me, ‘The joy of the diary is that there’s a gem on every page.’ She proved her point by opening the book at random and putting her finger on the entry for 18th May 1930: ‘The thing is now to live with energy and mastery, desperately. To despatch each day high-handedly. So not to dawdle and dwindle, contemplating this and that. No more regrets and indecisions. That is the right way to deal with life now that I am 48 and to make it more and more important and vivid as one grows old.’

An Oldie reader has been in touch to say that, while I drop a lot of names, I don’t seem to have encountered many sporting greats. Not so.

Seb Coe is a friend: we became MPS on the same day in 1992. Tessa Sanderson, the Olympic javelin thrower, shares a birthday with my wife. In the 1970s, in Dublin, I introduced the footballer George Best to the actress Sinead Cusack. Only a year before his death, I sat next to Sir Roger Bannister at an Oldie lunch. And the other day, I met up with the great golfer Sam Torrance, eight times a member of the European Ryder Cup Team. Sam and I agreed to have a game of golf together.

‘What’s your handicap now?’ I asked him.

‘Today,’ he said, ‘I imagine it will be you.’