Shropshire Star

I was Mrs Thatcher’s bodyguard: Shrewsbury man remembers unlikely friendship that lasted 20 years

He was a young, left-wing police officer from Shropshire, she was the future Conservative prime minister who would become known as the Iron Lady.

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Former police officer Barry Stevens, from Shrewsbury, protected Margaret Thatcher for 20 years

But when Barry Stevens was assigned as Margaret Thatcher’s protection officer in 1978, it marked the start of an unlikely friendship that would last for 20 years.

The role of the politician’s security officer has come under the spotlight in the new television series Bodyguard. The series, which attracted seven million viewers for its first episode this week, stars Keeley Hawes as Home Secretary Julia Montague and Richard Madden as her guard, David Budd.

Budd, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, has to defend the politician no matter what – but finds himself torn between his own beliefs and his boss’s decision to back military intervention in the Middle East.

Richard Madden, who plays David Budd in the TV series Bodyguard

Mr Stevens, now 74 and living in Shrewsbury, has lived the life for real. Despite initially having a very different outlook to the future prime minister, he remained at Mrs Thatcher’s side through her rise to power, her record 11 years in Downing Street, and was continuing to protect her right up until his retirement in 1998.

But Mr Stevens, who worked as a teacher before joining the police, says he is still troubled by one night he was not at her side – the IRA bombing of the Conservative Party conference in 1984.

He recalls being apprehensive when he was told his next posting was to be protection officer to the then Leader of the Opposition.

“When I was first told about the posting, I thought, ‘Crikey, I’m not sure I am going to last long with her,’” he says.

“From what I had read about her, I wasn’t sure I was going to make the grade, and she wouldn’t want me. But actually I grew to like her.”

Barry Stevens was Margaret Thatcher’s bodyguard and continued to protect her until his retirement

The grandfather-of-two says she never seemed bothered about the amount of hostility against her throughout her time in Parliament.

“Whenever I asked her about it, she would say, ‘You can worry about that, Barry’,” he says. “I started wearing a raincoat a lot of the time because of the number of eggs thrown at us.”

And he saw her make grown men cry, was ‘handbagged’ twice – and decided to wear a raincoat to protect himself against the number of egg attacks.

But he also says he saw a softer side to the politician, saying she was particularly good with children.

She was good with kids,” he says. “There are two sides to everyone. She showed that motherly side to us. On Christmas Eve one year, I got back to a room where there had been a meeting, with a big mess left behind,” he says.

Mrs Thatcher is seen alongside Mr Stevens, right, during a visit to the Whiston Colliery

“She had cleaned the room top to bottom. There were Christmas ­decorations, a fire in the hearth, a flask of coffee, a tin of biscuits and a miniature whisky. I told the story at a senior officers’ luncheon and when she found out she said, ‘Barry, if I knew you were going to tell that story, I would have made it a large whisky’.”

Mr Stevens was recovering from an emergency appendectomy at the time of the IRA bombing on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984.

“I wasn’t there when she was in the greatest danger of her life,” he says.

Although Margaret Thatcher narrowly escaped the blast, five people connected with the Conservative Party were killed, including a sitting Conservative MP, and 31 were injured. Margaret Tebbit, the wife of Conservative Party chairman Norman Tebbit, was left permanently disabled.

Barry Stevens regrets not being with the Prime Minister during the Brighton bombing

He says Mrs Thatcher had a dry sense of humour, demonstrated when she caught one of the guards eyeing up her legs.

“I think she was quite chuffed actually,” he says. Like in the TV programme, Mr Stevens says Mrs Thatcher found his presence an inconvenience in the early days, but grew to respect that he was prepared to put his safety on the line for him.

In Bodyguard, an initially spiky Montague becomes irritated by Budd requesting a diversion for safety reasons, quipping that he is making her job harder.

And Barry admits that in the early days, he annoyed Thatcher too. “They don’t want someone around them all the time and when they’re on holiday – they’re not used to it,” he says.

“But politicians are grateful because they know you put your life on their line for them. They try to make life easy for you if they can and you want to make their life as easy as possible. And there is a respect that grows.”