Thrifty Thatcher turned Chequers pool heating off

BRITAIN: Margaret Thatcher was so worried about the cost of running Chequers, the prime minister’s official country home, that she insisted the heating for the indoor swimming pool was kept off – except for special occasions.

The insight into Baroness Thatcher’s famously thrifty approach to spending is revealed in private papers from 1981 released this weekend from her archives at Churchill College, Cambridge.

‘‘One of her first acts on taking possession of the house had been to turn off the heat for the pool on economy grounds,’’ the archive says.

However, once that year ‘‘she switched it on for the guests’’, most of whom had been at the wedding that July of Prince Charles to Diana.

Guests who took a dip included Rosalind Runcie, wife of Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, who had conducted the wedding service, and Katherine Day, Australian-born wife of broadcaster Robin Day.

While the women enjoyed a swim, another guest, ITN newsreader Alastair Burnet, wrote to Thatcher thanking her for the lunch but adding that he was ‘‘grateful for [her] not making the swimming compulsory’’.

Laurence Olivier

also

attended and wrote that it had been ‘‘an extreme honour’’ to have been seated next to the prime minister.

Other guests included United States president Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, and former US ambassador to Britain Walter Annenberg, who in 1973 had donated the money for the pool in return for two visits made by former US president Richard Nixon to Chequers.