The death of Lady Trumpington, who was known for her raunchy jokes and rude gestures, has prompted widespread tributes from the establishment she loved to shock, including from prime ministers and fellow peers.
She was best known as the first peer to go viral after she was filmed in the House of Lord flicking a V-sign at the former defence secretary Lord King. Video of the 2011 incident reached new audiences on Tuesday as news of Trumpington’s death trended on Twitter.
Her performance as the oldest guest on Have I Got News for You – during which she expressed horror at the prospect of Boris Johnson becoming leader – was also widely shared.
Both Theresa May and David Cameron said how much they would missed her jokes. And even the UK’s intelligence and security agency GCHQ saluted her “sense of mischief”.
Cameron tweeted: “She was one of a kind, they simply don’t make politicians like that anymore … RIP Trumpers.”
On Edwina Currie
“I found it very hard to deal with Edwina Currie. What a bitch! She’s so pleased with herself. I thought she was dreadful. The eggs! I was always having to pick up her pieces.”
On Willie Whitelaw
“He was frightfully nice to me. One of the things I cherish is being brought breakfast in bed in the Lake District by the deputy prime minister and two cocker spaniels.”
On luxury
Her choice of a luxury item on Desert Island Discs was the crown jewels. She explained this would be only to ensure “somebody would come to look for me”.
After giving up smoking
“At the age of 80, there are very few pleasures left to me, but one of them is passive smoking.”
On detonating sheep
She justified her suggestion that sheep be used to detonate Falklands minefields by saying: “My point was that you can put a sheep out of its misery and eat it. You can’t do that to a man.”
On why she wasn't selected as an MP for 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.”
On the prospect of Boris Johnson as Tory leader
“God!”
May said: “She was a formidable figure in British politics and her kindness and humour will be sorely missed.”
And Lord King made light of the V-sign incident. “She was a good friend. It’s very sad. But she had a terrific innings and an amazing life. She made me much more famous by her famous joke – the famous two-fingered salute.”
She was born Jean Alys Campbell-Harris in 1922 to a wealthy American mother and a father who had served in the Bengal Lancers.
During the second world war, she spent time as a land girl on the family farm of the Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George before her family connections and knowledge of French and German help secure her a codebreaking position at Bletchley Park.
“Life only really began when I went to Bletchley,” she told the Observer. While at Bletchley she enjoyed hitchhiking to London to “behave so badly” at Claridge’s.
The fellow peer and former Paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson recalled how Trumpington had likened a late night vote in the Lords to London in the Blitz … “without the sex”.
She waited until I picked up my cup of tea and was drinking it and with a wicked smile said ‘but with a lot less sex’. I spat my tea into my cup and she chortled.
— Tanni Grey-Thompson (@Tanni_GT) November 27, 2018
After the war she married the headmaster Alan Barker, a former Cambridge don and teacher at Eton, whom she called just Barker. As Jean Barker she failed to get chosen as a Tory candidate in Ely after clashing with the selection committee. But she served as a councillor and mayor in Cambridge.
She was made a life peer in 1980 under the title Baroness Trumpington of Sandwich. Later she told John Major that another option had been her home village of Six Mile Bottom. “Which one would you have chosen?” she asked Major.
At the age of 67 she was appointed to Margaret Thatcher’s government as the oldest-ever female minister in the Department of Agriculture. She later served as a junior health minister, where she developed a disdain for Edwina Currie. She later described her fellow health minister as a “dreadful woman” and worse.
Despite her background in the Department of Health she didn’t give up smoking until she was 79, in 2001. Asked on Have I Got News for You what she did now after sex, she replied “cigars”.
When she was named peer of the year by the Oldie in 2012, the magazine presented her with a cartoon of her smoking a cigar. She hung it in the toilet of her Battersea flat.
Her eventful life is recalled in her celebrated 2014 memoir Coming Up Trumps. Interviewed about the book in the Observer, she said: “I don’t understand all this excitement. I didn’t write the damn book, and I haven’t read it, either.”
