Voices Off

‘SIR Denis Thatcher, we were told when he died last month, was in fact nothing like the right-wing, drunken golf bore of caricature.

‘Why did the golfer take two pairs of trousers on a round?’ I don’t know. ‘In case some bloody immigrant stole the ones he was wearing’

He was clever, politically astute and a successful businessman in his own right who only played up to the Denis of Private Eye’s Dear Bill fame because it was convenient to do so.

Well, it seems it was a part that Sir Denis played to perfection right up to his death, as the Telegraph witnesses during his last interview.

John Major is described as ‘a ghastly prime minister’ who destroyed the Tory party, while Tony Blair merits only ‘that bloody man’.

‘The whole of the situation of the Conservative Party today springs from that night when they dismissed the best prime minister the country has had since Churchill,’ he says.

He recalls how he wooed the young Margaret Thatcher – ‘a nice-looking young woman, always has been’ – on a tour of France in his ‘tart trap’ of a sports car.

And he reveals that he still had an eye for the ladies even into his dotage, most notably Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush.

‘Mark you, I never took any liberties, you know,’ he says in the interview, which will be broadcast on Channel 4 on Sunday.

‘I wasn’t trying to get off with them or anything like that ’cause that’s not my style.’

The Guardian, meanwhile, recalls that Sir Denis’ pet hate was the BBC, while his weakness, apart from gin and tonic, was the apartheid regime in South Africa.

On one occasion, it remembers, he shouted at anti-apartheid demonstrators: ‘Why don’t you all just bugger off to Moscow?’

How people got the idea that he was a right-wing drunk, we really don’t know…

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Posted: 1st, August 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink