The lady over the shop at No. 10

How Margaret Thatcher brings her personal touch to living ‘on the premises’.

The hall is a trifle large and the flowers in the marble fireplace arranged in formal banks. But the family teddy sits on a chair by the door, the gold-brown carpet reaching deep into the ancient rooms and passages is worn in places, and a huge bowl of lavender stands on a polished table in the first-floor anteroom.

“Come in, come in! Would you like some coffee? I'm afraid we only have Gold Blend here—do you like it black or with milk?” Momentarily, it could have been any woman welcoming me to her home—and in a sense it was. This month sees the 250th anniversary of No. 10 Downing Street as the residence of British Prime Ministers; the latest and historically most surprising is, of course, Margaret Thatcher.

She looks superbly healthy, relaxed and blazing with energy. True, she is recently back from holiday, but there is no trace of the deep, ingrained fatigue that shows on the faces of other Prime Ministers after only a few years in the job.

Nor of emotional strain, whether from the almost daily savaging by the media, unfriendly opinion polls or what probably causes her most internal distress of all: the sacking of well-liked colleagues in the Cabinet changes she had already planned when we met, and whose human aspect she was quick to speak of yesterday.

“You aren't just damaging someone's ego. You are taking away his car, his salary, and all the other privileges that go with being a Minister.”

Close to, the famous blue eyes are more of a brilliant turquoise, the immaculate hair a sensible shade of blonde, and the skin warm-toned, clear and healthy with never a hint of politicians' pallor. She wears a red-spotted navy silk dress, dark blue suede pumps and her usual jewellery—two rows of pearls, a bracelet of large [end p1] mixed stones and pearl earclips.

Only the rings are missing; a fact she notices as her fingers absentmindedly reach for the large one that usually adorns her left hand. “I must have left it on the edge of the basin,” she says. “Do you ever do that?” You feel that the moment the interview is over she will go and put them on.

Does “living over the shop,” I ask, mean that someone already notorious for the hours she works finds she has even more piled on her place?

“You're absolutely right. You—really—are—absolutely—right,” she says with the familiar jabbing, forceful emphasis. “If one isn't very careful more work is created just because you're more accessible.”

Years ago, she recalls, when they lived over the Grantham shop there would always be someone coming round to the house door at the back after hours, with “Oh, Mr Roberts, I forgot to order tea,” or “I've run out of butter—could you let me have some?”

“I suppose I could say that when I go up to the flat it's the same as going to Flood Street—or rather, our new house, though that isn't built yet. But I'd hate whoever was on duty to wonder dare we interrupt her?”

She would always, she says, rather be told about something, whatever it is. And when it is something bad her family is an enormous strength, as with the crashing snub from Oxford University.

“It was flashed all over the world and Mark immediately—immediately—rang me from the States and was loving and supportive just like Denis and Carol here. And the next day some lovely flowers came, with the note ‘Never mind, Mum, we still love you’.”

As for working hard, for which she is often criticised. It is the way she was brought up. “Anyway, I don't think there is anything particularly strange in the idea. Women are incredibly hard workers—it's almost part of their bloodstream. And if you're combining any kind of a job with bringing up a family it's second nature.”

The coffee arrives, along with delicate gold-bordered Minton cups (the same, incidentally, as used on the Queen's Flight); she takes hers black but there is hot milk for me in a silver jug.

“Do you know, except for some silver-plated salvers, there was no silver here at all when I came?” she says, “No china, no ornaments, nothing on the tables, not even very many pictures associated with our history, and never any flowers about. It looked rather like a house furnished to let.”

Today there are display cabinets of Spode and some marvellous pieces of English furniture borrowed from the V and A, brilliant vases from the British Museum, and a fresh rose daily on her desk from the two beds she had planted in the garden.

Borrowed silver gleams everywhere, from a beautiful George II coffee pot on one of the marble Kent mantelpieces to a silvergilt Mayor's Casket with a picture of Belton on one side and the Town Hall of Grantham on the other.

It is on loan from Lord Brownlow, who lent much of the silver, and dates from when he was Mayor of Grantham. It means just as much to her, says the Prime Minister, because her father, too, was the town's mayor.

But more than anything else she has added paintings, notably portraits, which combine her passion for history and love of paintings.

“If a fairy godmother left me a lot of money, undoubtedly what I'd spend it on is good pictures. And of course, once you've lived with them …”

Only last night, she adds, when she and Denis had finished the massive clear-out of the Scotney flat she undertakes every two years and were discussing the house to which they will move, they agreed that the one thing they lacked was a really good picture. “We're just not in that income bracket. But we've got several Bateman drawings and some good etchings and prints.”

The new house is a way of combining the two places she most likes to live: central London and the country. “I adore the country. If I'm under stress I go for a long walk, preferably up a hill. There's one near Chequers, where you can see 30 miles. It gives you a perspective. When I gardened I was very grateful the Good Lord made plants still keep on growing in spite of the worst some of us could do to them.”

She talks of the azaleas at the back of nearby No 12; the huge ilex in the centre of the lawn, the flowering cherries. “It's a marvellous spring garden [end p2] , but there was nothing for the summer. That's why I had two beds of roses planted by the back door.” All are strong-growing, many are the old-fashioned, fragrant varieties.

We move to the dining room. Here, two deep mirrors imported from the V & A give depth and light, a clutch of borrowed silver entree dishes and candelabra glisten from the sideboard and long table where 32 can dine comfortably. For bigger parties six round tables will seat 48, or a horseshoe table up to 66.

“But you can't have more than 250 people in all through this whole suite of five reception rooms or the ceilings would give way.” Or possibly the foundations: No. 10, built by the adventurer, spy, turncoat, ambassador and speculative builder George Downing in 1682, was described by Winston Churchill as “jerrybuilt.”

In another room, the Prime Minister bustles forward to twitch aside the heavy net curtains. “Could this window be opened?” she asks, “and please tuck these nets into the tiebacks—like this, here.” Turning to me she adds, “I'm always asking them to do this and they're always getting cross. But they really do stop fresh air circulating.”

They also darken a house that is already sunless. Even on this brilliant day, as the Prime Minister demonstrates, she has to switch the lights on before the rooms leap into life. “So I brought in plenty of table lamps. Anyway, indirect lighting is far more flattering.”

It also shows the spanking condition of the enormous Persian silk carpet in the main drawing room, a triumph of the Thatcher urge to clean, tidy, make the best of it. “When I came here, that carpet, which was made in about 1512, was valued at £500,000, and though it needed cleaning badly it was so old nobody dared touch it.

“I said if it's that old and valuable it should be on a wall, not where people walk all over it. So we got the British Museum along and they took one look and said, ‘It's a copy, about 80-years-old. We hold the original.’ I was really very relieved.”

In the beautiful small White Drawing Room, everyone's favourite, two more Turners have been added to the one already there. (It was here that No. 10's only Prime Ministerial death took place: in 1905, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman died in a corner near the window).

Other paintings show former Prime Ministers or those who have influenced British history. There is now a Nelson and a Wellington (“I've got four,” said the present Duke of Wellington during lunch at No. 10. “I'll give you one”) and George II, who gave the house to Sir Robert Walpole as a token of gratitude. Because he had already been involved in a scandal over fraud, Sir Robert did not—as was customary in those days—accept it as a personal gift from his sovereign, but on behalf of his office as First Minister.

After Walpole came a succession of incumbents ranging from the grand, like the Duke of Newcastle—who preferred his own far smarter house so lent No. 10 to two daughters successively on their marriages—to the eccentric. Like Lord North, so absent-minded that he went straight back to No. 10 after losing office and had to be told by the staff: “My Lord, you are no longer the King's First Minister.”

There were family men like Spencer Perceval, with his huge brood of small children (one of whom was the only birth at Downing Street), Walpole with his mistress and sons—“that sweet corner” is how Horace Walpole described No. 10—and Attlee sitting with his hands held out for an hour every evening while his wife wound her knitting wool round them.

There were the unpopular, like Lord Bute, who needed a bodyguard of prizefighters to protect him in the street; the popular, like Disraeli, whose rooms were filled with primroses by the Queen herself; and the amorous—Asquith writing love letters to Venetia Stanley during Cabinet meetings springs immediately to mind (the only time Cabinet was ever actually interrupted was by Mary Wilson, entering to tell Harold he now had twin grandchildren).

Which of all her predecessors does Margaret Thatcher admire most? “The great Lord Salisbury,” she says without hesitation.

“He wasn't coldly ambitious but was led by a sense of duty, and he was able to light upon the issues that really mattered and make the right decisions about them.” One day, perhaps, this will be her epitaph, too.