Charles Moore
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‘Arthur Negus’ — Tony Bray — is the only one of Margaret’s early loves still alive, though sadly he is now in poor health. Once I had tracked him down, I found him happy to speak about those distant days at the end of the war when he danced with the future prime minister. But he was extremely anxious — 60 years later — that his wife (who is now dead) should not know of my inquiries. ‘If you ring up, please say nothing of your purpose,’ he said, ‘and if you write, please don’t do so in a Daily Telegraph envelope.’ When he married his wife, a couple of years after the relationship had ended, a similar sense of honour induced him to destroy all Margaret’s letters to him. As a biographer, I protest, but as a fellow human being, I salute his touching delicacy.
The more I re-read it, the more masterly do I think the Bishop of London’s sermon at the funeral was. His thought about Lady Thatcher being, in death, ‘one of us’, was a neat way of putting Shakespeare’s famous lines that ‘Golden lads and girls all must, /As chimney sweepers, come to dust’. Having established the common humanity, he was then able to point out, without getting into politics, how she herself understood this in a Christian context. He quoted from her speech in St Lawrence Jewry in 1978. In it, he reminded the congregation, she spoke of community as the Body of Christ, a concept which (her words, not his) revealed ‘the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of Society’. When she famously said, elsewhere, that there was ‘no such thing as society’, this was part of a discourse about what society really rested on, rather than an attack on its existence. Bishop Chartres explained this with grace and tact, but its effect is a slow-burn version of Mark Antony over the grave of Caesar.
The Bishop’s striking black cope was, I discovered, made for his predecessor for the funeral of Winston Churchill. This was not announced at the time, since it might have inflamed the controversy then raging. The mantle was quietly handed on.
Next to us at the funeral was Nicci Pugh, nearly unique in being a female Falklands veteran. She was a naval nursing sister on SS Uganda, and has written a book about it (White Ship, Red Crosses; Melrose Books). She introduced me to some of her former patients in the congregation, including a moustachioed Para called Denzil Connick, who lost his legs in the battle for Mount Longdon. Because of his disability, he could not move as others came into his pew. He looked pleased as Joan Collins and his fellow Welshman, Shirley Bassey, were forced to climb over him.
Two pleasing vignettes. At the entrance, we were surprised to encounter a shabby man in a raincoat emerging from the cathedral carrying two cups of takeaway coffee. It was one of my heroes, Sir Colin McColl, the former head of MI6. When the IRA speak of Britain’s grim ‘securocrats’, I always think of this donnish, kindly man, and smile. The other was the substantial figure of Bruce Anderson trying to sit down. About 40 per cent of him spread on to his neighbour, Sir David Frost, whose expression of polite, restrained horror was a joy.
There was another nice touch. Lady Thatcher’s Order of the Garter was carried by her grandson up the aisle. Each Garter is numbered. By chance, hers is No. 10.
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