Margaret Thatcher often said that she could not have achieved her success without her husband Denis, describing him as “the golden thread running through my life”.
And throughout their marriage, spanning more than 50 years, there was never a public scandal attached to their union.
A new book, however, is now claiming that the Iron Lady had two extramarital affairs. Tina Gaudoin reveals in her book, The Incidental Feminist, that Thatcher not only enjoyed an “extracurricular friendship” with a close aide who touched her knee during dinners, but that she also had two affairs, one early in her career as an MP and one with another politician.
Tina Gaudoin claimed multiple sources, including a former Tory minister, had told her of Thatcher’s dalliances
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Discussing her latest work at Cheltenham Literature Festival, which is sponsored by The Times and The Sunday Times, the author also claims that Denis Thatcher struck up a surprisingly close friendship with the former model Mandy Rice-Davies, one of the main figures in the Profumo affair, after the Thatchers left Downing Street.
Gaudoin said multiple sources, including the novelist and former Conservative minister Jonathan Aitken, told her that Margaret Thatcher was involved with somebody else “very early on in her parliamentary career”, and then “quite possibly” later with Sir Humphrey Atkins, the MP for Spelthorne.
Humphrey Atkins was Edward Heath’s chief whip
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Atkins served as the chief whip under Edward Heath and in opposition, and then as secretary of state for Northern Ireland between 1979 and 1981. He was granted a life peerage in 1987 and became Baron Colnbrook of Waltham St Lawrence — Lord Colnbrook.
Atkins was married to Margaret Spencer-Nairn and had four children. Anna Keay, his granddaughter, is the present head of the Landmark Trust. He died in 1996.
Asked about Atkins, Aitken said: “There were knowledgeable rumours to that effect at the time. His good looks might have appealed to her, but his political brain was hopeless.”
Another politician told Gaudoin: “The joke about Atkins was that for someone who was not very good, he kept getting promoted. Now why was that?”.
Sources told the author that Lord Bell, Thatcher’s head of PR, had an “extracurricular friendship” with the leader, and that “one of her favourite things” was Bell putting his hand on her knee “and other stuff” during dinners.
“He was unlikely to have got to what the Americans delicately term ‘third base’ (or even first or second),” Gaudoin writes. Sources told her Bell, who died in 2019, discussed with them the incidents, but that they only had his word for it.
Lord Moore, who wrote the authorised biography of Thatcher, said: “I have heard the Atkins rumour in the past, but there is no evidence that I have ever seen to support it.”
He added: “My own sense is that it is vanishingly unlikely. I have never before heard the Tim Bell rumour. Again, I think it vanishingly unlikely.”
Gaudoin’s book also discusses Denis Thatcher’s unlikely friendship with Mandy Rice-Davies
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Gaudoin argued at the event in Cheltenham that Thatcher was not anti-feminist and she helped women by “normalising female power”.
“There is an element amongst women that really don’t like her just because they don’t like her. I think we owe her a great debt actually,” she said.
The Incidental Feminist, which was published last month, also discusses Denis Thatcher’s unlikely friendship with Rice-Davies, the model and showgirl who, with Christine Keeler, was involved in the 1963 Profumo affair.
Gaudoin claims that after Thatcher left No 10, Denis struck up a close friendship with Rice-Davies, exchanging affectionate letters beginning “Mandy dear”, discussing military history, and holidaying together.
“A lot of people I spoke to said that she was far more sexy in person than she appeared to be,” Gaudoin said. “A lot of people said that when she entered the room there was a definite frisson.”
Valery d’Estaing, the president of France from 1974 to 1981, once said of Thatcher: “She has the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.”
Alan Clark, a junior minister in Thatcher’s governments, praised her “dainty ankles” in his diary, and the journalist Christopher Hitchens called her “surprisingly sexy” after she once spanked him on the bottom with a parliamentary order paper.