Haven My SIR BERNARD INGHAM

Margaret Thatcher’s former chief press secretary, 87, in the sitting room of his home in Purley, south London

1 SPECIAL CASE

This 1920s bungalow has been my home since I moved to London from Yorkshire in 1965. I never used this black box [the Civil Service equivalent of a Cabinet minister’s red box] because it’s much too heavy, but it’s a happy reminder of my long career in Whitehall. When I first joined the Civil Service in 1967 after a career in journalism, I intended to return to Fleet Street after two years, but it took me 24 years. I fell on my feet working for Mrs Thatcher because she took little interest in media presentation and left me to get on with the job.

2 LONDON PRIDE

I’ve been a supporter of Crystal Palace for more than 50 years and used to watch them play regularly until ill health intervened. Last year a former neighbour, Ken Bromley, a Dunkirk veteran who sadly died this year aged 100, said his care home was taking him to watch Palace play Arsenal. I said I’d accompany him, and we were taken in the care home’s ambulance. The club treated us like royalty and gave us a scarf each. Ken also received a football signed by the team.

3 BROWBEATEN

I regularly appeared in political cartoons. This one is sending up Mrs Thatcher’s legendary bossiness, although she needed to behave that way to get things done. My bushy eyebrows were a gift to cartoonists. I once interviewed the former Labour chancellor Denis Healey for a pilot TV programme on Yorkshire Television and I started by saying, ‘Welcome to the Yorkshire Eyebrows Convention.’

4 WHISKY GALORE

Mrs Thatcher presented me with this bottle of Prime Minister’s whisky one Christmas. She enjoyed a tipple at 6pm, when I joined her in her office at No 10 for a briefing with colleagues.

She drank Bell’s whisky, but ruined it by adding soda. It was one of the few luxuries in her day. She got up at 6am and worked virtually non-stop until

2am. I have personal evidence of this because she communicated a lot by notes, signing with her initials to show she’d read them, and sometimes the T was falling off the page.

5 GOSPEL TRUTH

The Bible here, dated 1913, and the elocution book underneath it belonged to my mother, Alice. I went to church in Hebden Bridge, near Halifax. My mother gave up her job as a cotton weaver to bring up my brother and me, but was a chronic asthmatic – a condition I inherited. The 120-year-old globe behind belonged to my mother’s father, a self-taught expert on flora, fauna and geography who took my younger brother and me on endless educational walks.

6 ARISE, SIR BERNARD!

This is my wife Nancy and me after I received my knighthood at Buckingham Palace in 1990. The Queen said to me, ‘I hope you’re going to have a rest now’, and I said, ‘No, I’m writing my memoirs.’ I met Nancy in court. I hasten to add she was a policewoman and I was a reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post. We married in 1956 and had one son, John. Sadly, she died last year.

As told to Angela Wintle. The Slow Downfall Of Margaret Thatcher: The Diaries Of Bernard Ingham is published by Biteback Publishing, priced £20.