Baroness Trumpington: Outspoken Conservative peer who worked with Alan Turing’s codebreakers at Bletchley Park

In years past, followers of political quiz games would stump friends by asking them to name the oldest minister in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and then John Major. The answer was Baroness Trumpington of Sandwich, who was a junior minister in their respective governments from 1985 to 1992, by which point she was the oldest ever female minister. Her last role was as baroness-in-waiting to the Queen between 1992 and 1997.

In 2011, aged 89, she famously stuck two fingers up at her Conservative colleague Lord King of Bridgwater in the Lords, after he made an unflattering reference to her advancing years. Clips of the televised footage went viral, raising her profile. An autobiography was commissioned – the ghost-written Coming Up Trumps.

To the publisher’s horror, she said: “I don't understand what all the fuss is about, I didn't write the damn book and haven't read it either”.

Baroness Trumpington revelled, however, in the attention it gave her and the respectful reviews and interviews she received.

She was born Jean Alys Campbell-Harris to an affluent household in 1922.

Her father Arthur Edward Campbell-Harris served with the Bengal Lancers. Her mother Doris Robson came from a wealthy American family which faced financial woe following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 – they were forced to lose the servants and move into a home with no gas or electricity. As a child, she felt neglected at her parents paying more attention to her two younger brothers. Later, friends wondered if that was a possible reason why she embraced the limelight in her adult years.

Trumpington was educated at boarding schools in England and France and, apart from a course at a secretarial college, never sat an exam – but she was fluent in French, German and Italian. She could drive a car because she gained a licence during the war when there were no tests. She was tall and shy. But she had drive, was eager for adventure and prepared to stick up for herself, all life-long characteristics.

In the early years of the Second World War she worked as a land-girl on the Sussex farm of former prime minister David Lloyd George, who happened to be a friend of her father. Her language skills and a word from her well-connected dad helped her, aged 18, to gain a post working on naval intelligence at Bletchley Park, the secret centre for cracking Nazi codes. As a cypher clerk she transcribed messages picked up from German submarines which were sent to Alan Turing’s codebreakers, who worked in a separate unit.

The need for secrecy was drummed into her such that she said in her book, “even now, when we are allowed to talk, I still find it hard except with others who were there”. She met Turing by delivering messages to his office.

In 2013 she added her signature to an appeal calling for his conviction in 1952 for homosexuality to be overturned – later that year he received a royal pardon.

Life at Bletchley had broadened the young Jean’s horizons and added to her self-confidence. She worked in Paris for the European Transport Organisation and in 1951 went to New York to work for a Madison Square advertising agency. She led a hectic social life but was no nearer securing a relationship or settling on a career. But in 1953 she met an Eton schoolmaster, William Alan Barker, in New York – he was a visiting scholar at Yale University They married in 1954.

She was a strong support for her husband at these boys-only schools. On one occasion the combination of high spirits and attention-seeking led her to jump fully clothed into the swimming pool at a school prize-giving. Her husband was outraged and the marriage came under strain.

Being a headmaster’s wife was not sufficient for a woman of great energy and ability. She threw herself into the political and social life of Cambridge.

She was elected to the council in 1963 and became mayor in 1971. She was county councillor for the Trumpington ward in Cambridge in 1981.

She was frustrated in her efforts to become an MP, given the bias and narrow-mindedness of Conservative selection committees. In the 1979 Parliament there were only eight Conservative female MPs out of a total of 339, although one was prime minister. When interviewed by a selection committee at the Isle of Ely she was asked why her applications had been so unsuccessful so far, and replied, “Because of selection committees like you”.

Appointed to a life peerage in 1980 she sat on the Conservative benches. Unlike many of her colleagues the peerage was not a reward for long service as an MP or cabinet minister, or having made a substantial donation to party coffers. It was for service to the party and she welcomed the opportunity to be a working peer. Always close to Tory grandees she was introduced to the House by lords Butler and Thorneycroft. Her maiden speech was on old people’s homes and the need for more public facilities to cope with incontinence.

The baroness was appointed a government whip in 1983, followed by spells as a joint parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Department of Health and Social Security and two years later in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food. She was promoted to minister of state in the same department in 1989. She successfully sponsored a bill which eased the legal restrictions on shop opening hours.

Although Trumpington relied heavily on the material prepared by colleagues and officials when addressing the Lords on complex matters she had a knack of making it interesting and even amusing. At times, the predominantly male House of Lords did not know how to react to her speeches, given her age and gender. One such time, as a health minister, she explained government policy on containing the spread of Aids and defended the use of explicit adverts in the campaign against the disease.

Baroness Trumpington seemed determined to age disgracefully. She liked to claim that because of her age she did “not give a damn”. In fact age had little to do with it; she had always been outspoken. She liked a drink and smoked until she was 79, notwithstanding that she had been a health minister. In her eighties she appeared on Have I Got News For You and on other television programmes, including The Great British Menu. With Mary Berry she did more than anybody to promote the cause of senior women on television. She was made Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 2005.

Unsurprisingly, Trumpington she was something of a traditionalist regarding political institutions. She opposed electoral reform and the ban on hunting and supported tough measures on crime. Until she retired in 2017, in her 95th year, she still made a point of attending the Lords every day it sat.

To the baroness, her fellow peers and staff had become “family” (her husband had died in 1988) and she had good friends in other parties. Trumpington, who is survived by her son, Adam, 63, had a steady stream of visitors to her apartment and could be relied on to provide colourful copy for journalists and students who came to interview her. She had no time for modern communications, saying “I haven’t got a Twitterer, I don’t use a mobile phone and I’m not on Facebook”.

She followed horse racing and for some years had been a steward at Folkestone Racecourse. Asked on the radio programme Desert Island Discs to choose a luxury item to take to the island she chose the Crown Jewels “because somebody would come to look for me”.

Jean Alys Barker, Baroness Trumpington, socialite and politician, born 23 October 1922, died 26 November 2018