Former MPs Sir Nicolas Winterton and his wife Ann are not worthy of a glowing set of memoirs – Instead, this pair of ghastly grabbers deserve all the criticism ever thrown at them
Excerpts from Sir Nicholas and his equally bombastically ghastly wife Lady (Ann) Winterton’s daughter’s memoirs about her parents’ career were published in the Daily Mail this weekend. The account was anything but pragmatic and instead filled with nonsense about this rather tediously grating couple’s time in parliament.
In it, Sarah Winterton – whose father once pompously remarked: “They want to stop members of parliament travelling first class. That puts us below local councillors and officers of local government. They all travel first class. Majors in the army travel first class” – termed her expense claim loving mum and dad “magnificently maverick” and described them as having “the courage of a lion and lioness”.
Anyone who “disses” “Sir Bloodyminded and Lady Bolshie” (as they supposedly like to be called), according to their daughter, is ”pompous and cack-handed” and that Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, once described them as “c**ts – and ugly ones to boot” unsurprisingly offended the junior Winterton too. Here, indeed, is a family that frankly is anything but “riotous” and here is a pair of leeches that should long ago have been consigned to Siberia.
Sir Nicholas – a man with a “fondness for the sound of his own voice” and a man prone to saying “boo loudly and often” – “does not talk, he orates”; his wife, meanwhile, “has a carrying voice, reminiscent of Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahila”. The pair regard Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke as “closet socialists” and David Cameron as “[lacking] gravitas”. Edward Heath, put simply, was “the bounder who took Britain into Europe”. It is also said that the duo are “too realistic to think their names will be remembered centuries after they are dead” but bizarrely – hold your horses – “don’t expect statues of themselves to be erected by public subscription in the squares and marketplaces of Cheshire”.
Wrongly excused by some as “eccentric”, Lady Winterton attracted controversy in 2001 and 2004 for racist jokes about Pakistanis and Chinese people. She was criticised again in 2005 for similar remarks about immigrants and deemed “deplorable” by the then leader of the Conservatives, Michael Howard. Sarah Winterton, of course, neglects to mention this and also ignores the pair’s support for Section 28 and the reintroduction of capital punishment. Her account isn’t worth the paper it’s written on and her parents instead should be remembered for what they truly are: A bigoted pair of grasping politicians.