The unorthodox life of Baroness Trumpington, in her own words

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24-02-2025

This article is published as part of The Telegraph's Greatest Interviews series, which revisits the most significant, informative and entertaining conversations with notable figures over our 170 year history. The below interview is introduced by original interviewer Elizabeth Grice. It appears as it was originally published.
One of the Conservative Party's longest continuous serving ministers (she worked for the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major from 1983 to 1997), Jean Barker was also one of the most refreshing. Created a life peer in 1980, she was popular in the House of Lords, where she became famous for flicking a V-sign to Lord King of Bridgwater, a gesture which his family said made him famous.
Liz Grice caught her in fine spirits at her London home aged 90, and persuaded her to talk about her unorthodox life – her early years at Bletchley Park, her time as a New York socialite, and her varied political career, including a spell in the Department of Health and Social Security, during which she smoked like a chimney. – Elizabeth Grice
'I'm holding the bloody door!' booms a voice down the hall of the mansion block. Baroness Trumpington's robust greeting sets the scene for what is to follow. In one hand she grasps a walking stick, with the other she is wrestling with her spring-loaded front door. Though built like a galleon, she is nearly 90 and her strength cannot be what it was.
Only so much dilly-dallying can be tolerated. She makes her way stiffly to the kitchen, which looks stocked for a siege, and shakes an enormous quantity of coffee granules into a china mug. The Olympics, she explains, have rather upset her routine, so she has had to shop for three weeks.
At nearly 6ft tall, dressed in a pale grey suit and black patent shoes and trailing a cloud of Paloma Picasso perfume, she is almost too magnificent for domestic life, gracious though her style of domesticity is. People like to caricature her as stentorian, and it's true that her voice leaves no corner of the House of Lords chamber unscoured, but in her quieter moments I have never heard anyone speak with such a lovely intonation.
Where most people have family photographs, she has a storyboard of modern British history: a warmly signed photo of John Major, a picture of her with Ted Heath, a framed letter from Gordon Brown, thanking her for 'the vital service' she performed for the country at Bletchley Park during the war. In another photo, resplendent in Royal Mail red, she is next-but-one to the Queen at a state banquet. What was Her Majesty like to talk to? 'Cosy.'
Then there is the black-and-white image of her inspecting raspberry canes with Lloyd George, when she was a land girl on his Sussex farm in 1940. 'I hated being a land girl,' she says. 'There were only old men there. The young ones had joined up. And it was all apples. No animals, which I love. I lived in Miss Stevenson's bungalow [Lloyd George's mistress and later wife]. I liked her very much.'
The land girl episode was mercifully brief, releasing Baroness Trumpington — or Jean Campbell-Harris, as she was then — for more exciting duties at the cipher intelligence centre at Bletchley Park. She is free now to talk about how she helped to crack the German U-boat code, but decades of imposed silence have calcified into habit. 'You can — but you can't,' she says. 'None of us can because we have kept quiet for so long. The shifts were the worst thing: nine to six, four to midnight, midnight to nine. You could never get a sleep pattern. I was tired all the time.'
That didn't stop her hitch-hiking to London on 48-hour leaves and dancing all night.
Just as it seems as if the subject of Bletchley has run out of steam, she remembers a 'very unsuitable' incident from those days. She and her small group specialising in the analysis of German naval signals were punished for singing the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the Nazi Party's anthem. 'You had nothing to do but work so you got up to mischief,' she explains. 'I know the whole thing.'
Suddenly, she breaks into song: 'Die Fahne hoch! Die Reiten fest geschlossen! Very naughty, but we were very young.'
Anyone who has kept up with the long life and energetic times of the Conservative life peer will know that naughtiness has not been confined to her youth. Only a few months ago, she was captured on camera giving a two-finger sign to Lord King of Bridgwater when he unwisely (and incorrectly, as it happens) referred to her as looking 'pretty old' during a Remembrance Day debate.
Twitter fans made her a celebrity overnight. At first she tried to pretend that her fingers had flown up involuntarily, or that she was primping her hair, but she knew it was no good. 'It was entirely between him and me — I thought. I wasn't conscious of there being television [cameras there]. I did that [she repeats the gesture with faux innocence] to his face. His family say he is famous now.'
And her gesture has enriched the English idiom. Richard Ingrams, editor of The Oldie magazine, wrote of an obstructive female Morris dancer recently: 'I couldn't resist giving her a Baroness Trumpington.' Age and a certain bullying charm have licensed her to behave badly when she wants to get her own way in the Lords.
As a former agriculture minister [at 69, she was the oldest female minister yet], she feels for dairy farmers who are forced to sell milk at less than cost price because of supermarket price wars. The other day, during an unrelated farming question, she leapt up to demand that supermarkets should agree a minimum price for milk. She 'got a dusty answer' for speaking out of context, but she had made her point.
Baroness Trumpington is unreformable. When she was in her late sixties, she claimed that she'd had a good life and there was no point in spoiling it by being too careful. She did not give up smoking until she was 79.
People respond in surprising ways to her evident joie de vivre and gift for harnessing goodwill. Her flat in Battersea caught fire when she was out one freezing January day, but she saved what she could and kind friends paid to have all her pictures restored. A neighbour ('an absolute angel, bog-Irish') lent the homeless baroness, newly widowed, her flat for three months.
In fact, her daily life is oiled and polished by a network of vital friendships. There is the taxi driver who takes her shopping, waits, deposits her bags and then drives her on to Westminster, her 'two fat ladies' from Waitrose who have twice been to tea with her at the Lords, her chums in shops, her friends in the post office, the man who mends her fuses, the Lords doorkeepers, the Westminster policemen who treat her like their mother. 'They are all my true friends,' she says. 'Without them I would be very unhappy.' And all will be invited to the Lords for her 90th birthday party in October. 'The House of Lords is my family in many ways.'
She tells of a policeman at the Peers' Entrance who exclaimed: 'You're filthy dirty!' She looked down to find that her coat was indeed muddy from carrying plants. 'That's what I mean by friendship,' she says. 'They call a spade a bloody shovel and help you.'
Her two and a half years as health and social security minister (during which time she was still smoking like a chimney) seem to have left a deep nostalgia for a time when politics was less humdrum. 'Willie Whitelaw used to come in when I was doing the enormous social security Bill and bellow: 'Morning, Jean. How many millions are you losing us today?' Those were the days. Life was fun.'
She has always played to the gallery, but not at the expense of a proper seriousness about the issues in hand. She relished being called a 'fat old scrubber' by her critics for suggesting with typical practicality that sheep should be used to detonate Falklands minefields. 'My point,' she said at the time, 'was that you can put a sheep out of its misery and eat it. You can't do that to a man.'
Her upbringing was privileged, 'partly because my parents were snobs', but there were money worries. Her father was a Bengal Lancer who became aide-de-camp to the viceroy of India and knew Lloyd George. Her American mother lost a fortune in the 1929 crash and turned to interior decorating. The need to impress clients meant that their home, near Sandwich in Kent, was full of beautiful things and Jean developed an eye for antiques.
'I am a great bargain person,' she says. 'Those two wall lights cost me £8. I used to go to weekly auctions when I lived in Cambridge. I was known as 'Good old Mrs Barker' [her married name]. A hell of a lot of things here come from auctions.'
She left her hated boarding school and at 15, never having taken an exam, was packed off to study art and literature in France. After her secret war, she went to work for an advertising agency in America and met her husband, Alan Barker, who was to become headmaster of the Leys School, Cambridge. They had a son, Adam, a lawyer. She adored entertaining and being a mother figure to her husband's pupils.
For more than a decade she was a Cambridge city councillor and then mayor of Cambridge. Had she ever thought of becoming an MP? Of course she had. She tried for the Isle of Ely. 'A godforsaken bit of the world. Driving from Cambridge, there isn't even a pub on the way. I was Mrs Barker then and they called me Baker all through the interview. At the end, they said: 'Why do you think you're not in Parliament already?' I said: 'Because of selection committees like you,' and went out and burst into tears.' She never made it to the Commons.
It must have been sweet revenge when she was elevated to the peerage in 1980. The Lords proved a perfect platform and Baroness Trumpington of Sandwich quickly won over the House as a plain-speaking, effective performer. Sunday trading was her baby. As a government whip, she became known as 'the keeper of the gate', drawing herself to her full height and majesty to deter Tory peers from sloping away before a critical vote.
Age has not withered her in the slightest. She loves horse racing, is a former steward of Folkestone racecourse, plays bridge and would probably still drive if she hadn't given up her car when she became a minister. Now she would have to take her first driving test and isn't sure that her eyes, ruined by years of needlepoint, would be up to it.
Like any realistic person of her age, she thinks of last things. Her two younger brothers are dead. 'With age comes much more of an acceptance. You take dying more for granted. I don't want to go into a home and I do worry about my eyes. But I've got a nice little life for myself here and I have good friends upstairs who are superb to me.'
There is one positive thing about getting older. 'You don't give a damn about what you say. Other people's opinions matter less — unless they're medical.'
With that, she has to get on with her day. 'I think I'm going to have to chuck you out,' she says brightly, handing me some letters to post. 'Could you do me one last favour? It's very difficult to switch this light off at the back…'
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