Denis Thatcher: Sir Denis Thatcher, who has died aged 88, was the ideal consort for Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady - an adaptable businessman with the values of the colonial era, who did not take Westminster politics seriously enough to embarrass his wife but who was prepared to control his scepticism for the sake of a woman, 10 years his junior, whom he regarded as special.
As someone who often gave the impression of putting affairs of state before the needs of individuals, she seemed to recognise and appreciate that.
When Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative opposition in 1975, and the media besieged the family home in Flood Street, Chelsea, her husband was at his desk at Burmah Oil before nine the next morning - as if nothing had happened. It was not until he retired that the consort role became a larger one, and even then his directorships made him a busy traveller.
If Margaret was the least relaxed person in the world - as her daughter Carol thought - Denis was the most apparently relaxed, a man comfortable with himself and able to deal with human beings in a usually emollient way. Few men could have carried it off, even with the support of scarlet-lined opera cloaks and numerous gin and tonics; few men except the weak and dependent - which Denis Thatcher was not - would have wanted to be a consort to a dominant woman; and few men could have camouflaged themselves into a P.G. Wodehouse figure without losing the respect of the satirists who wrote him down as a comic character, while sensing, on meeting him, that there was rather more to him than that.
He certainly understood the volatility of the crowd. After his wife's last election victory in 1987, she was cheered by the crowds outside No 10. "In a year," said Denis, "she'll be so unpopular you won't believe it."
Nor was he afraid to speak to the point in royal circles. When the Duchess of York remarked to him, "Oh Denis, I do get an awful press, don't I?" he mimicked doing up a zip fastener across his lips and replied: "Yes, ma'am, has it occurred to you to keep your mouth shut?"
His family hailed from Wanganui, a coastal town in New Zealand. His grandfather set up a firm producing weed killer for railway tracks, the origin of the family fortunes. At 28, his father settled in London to run a British version of the company, Atlas Preservatives, which moved on to deal in paint and general chemicals. He married a businesswoman, Lilian Bird, the daughter of a London horse dealer. Denis was born just after the start of the first World War in Lewisham, south London. He went to boarding school at Bognor Regis and Mill Hill. He did not shine, but was good at cricket and rugby.
In 1933, he left to join the family firm, where he was expected to work his way up from the bottom. He went to Germany as works manager in 1937 and came back with the view that war was not a question of "if" but "when".
At its outbreak, he joined the 34th searchlight regiment of the Royal Artillery and liked military life, albeit because it gave him a chance to organise rather than to kill. Bad eyesight relegated him to staff duties. Promoted to major in 1945 in the British HQ at Marseilles, he organised the movement of thousands of Canadian troops from Italy to Belgium, and was made an MBE.
But the war marked his life in a way that was to remain a virtual secret for a generation. In 1941, he had met the beautiful Margaret Kempson at an officers' tea dance: they married in March 1942, never lived together because of the circumstances of war and divorced in 1948, believing they had nothing in common. It was a fairly common wartime story, but Denis was always reluctant to talk about it, and his second wife Margaret, who disliked being second in anything, even more so - she did not tell her twins Carol and Mark until they were 23.
At the end of the war, Thatcher came out of the army with reluctance, and only because he was asked to take charge of the family firm. The war had left him with the view that a stiff upper lip was an asset, and that, as a businessman, he was probably more use than many from more socially privileged backgrounds.
He met Margaret Roberts, the Oxford research chemist at a dinner dance organised by his trade association, whose chairman told him: "That's the one!" She liked his Methodism and his money talk. He looked like her adored father, Alderman Alfred Roberts of Grantham. At first, Thatcher was rather keener on her than she was on him, but when he proposed in 1951, she accepted.
The proposal coincided with her second unsuccessful attempt to get into parliament for Dartford. Ironically, in 1949, Denis had been offered, and declined, the same candidacy. After she had thanked party workers at the count, he took the microphone to report that the candidate was to become his wife. They were married at John Wesley's Methodist chapel in City Road, and spent their honeymoon in Portugal, Madeira and Paris.
There was something of the comic caricature in the fact that the birth of their twins took Denis by surprise - he was watching a Test match when they appeared early. As far as the children were concerned, there were firm rules - no pets, no slippers - but no corporal punishment either. Both children greatly loved him; and in her affectionate 1996 biography of her father, Below The Parapet, Carol Thatcher fought hard - if unsuccessfully - against his gin-and-expletives image.
In 1959, his wife finally entered the Commons for Finchley. Two years later, under Macmillan, she got her first government job, as joint parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Pensions. By 1963, Denis had sold the family business to Castrol for £560,000, a deal that netted him only £10,000 personally but gave him a job on the parent board.
Eventually, but much, much later, in 1975, he retired - but as divisional director of planning and control at Burmah Oil, which had taken over Castrol. He imagined a life of non-executive directorships, golf, Savoy lunches with chums and watching rugby. Being touch judge at the 1956 England-France rugby match had been a highlight of his life.
But his wife's career had continued to advance. In 1970, as Edward Heath led the Conservatives to a surprise election victory, she became secretary of state for education and science, and - as "Margaret Thatcher milk snatcher" - famous at last. Then, in 1974, came Heath's two general election defeats. With Sir Keith Joseph, the leading theorist of the Conservative right - whom Denis Thatcher labelled "England's greatest Man" - pulling back from a leadership challenge, the way eventually opened in 1975 for his wife to be elected as Conservative leader.
He reacted by refusing all requests for interviews - journalists were "reptiles". He harboured a special contempt for the BBC, an attitude confirmed during the 1982 Falklands war when he claimed that he heard someone say on air: "The British military authorities say, if they are to be believed . . ."
Such indignations gave the satirists something to work on. The image was most clearly fixed by John Wells's Dear Bill letters in Private Eye. These featured Denis Thatcher writing to a golfing chum - generally acknowledged to be Bill Deedes, the former Daily Telegraph editor and Conservative minister.
The setting was comings and goings in a vexatious Downing Street and gave Wells an opportunity to show Denis as a figure of fun, but never of contempt.
When the real Denis Thatcher did dabble in political advice, it was invariably not that of a Colonel Blimp. He counselled that the Argentinians should not be overly humiliated in the Falklands, since it would make them more difficult to deal with. He could be a rock of commonsense. After the first state dinner at Downing Street in 1979, he said the cutlery "belonged in the sergeant's mess"; it was immediately replaced. When touring a Falklands battlefield with his wife, she saw a box of live ammunition and asked what it was. "For heaven's sake, woman, don't get out and countit!" Denis commanded.
He may have crashed through various faux-pas, loved a South Africa that was ruled by apartheid, and referred to black people in Brixton as "fuzzy-wuzzies", but Denis Thatcher remained a decent man - "I hope I have never hurt anyone" - resourceful, disciplined, a man who worked quietly for many charities but believed that emoting achieved nothing except a breach of good manners. His baronetcy in 1990 was his public reward.
Denis Thatcher's wife may, however, have found some of his quips difficult to take. Asked once by a stranger during her premiership what his wife did, he replied: "She has a temporary job." It summed up his wry, dry attitude to political life in a nutshell. She, and their two children, survive him.
Denis Thatcher: born May 10th, 1915; died June 26th, 2003.