MADE BY Aspreys of London, carried by Margaret Thatcher, it was the handbag that created a verb. Now, it is to be sold off at a charity auction next month, organised by one-time convict Jeffrey Archer.
During her time in 10 Downing Street, the handbag came with her to European Council summits, White House encounters with Ronald Reagan, the famous teapot summit with Charles J Haughey in 1980 and Garret FitzGerald in Dublin Castle four years later.
The former Conservative Party deputy chairman said he had asked Lady Thatcher to donate an item to the auction, which will also include the watch used to clock Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile in 1954, expressing delight when she suggested the black handbag.
In her dealings with her own ministers, Lady Thatcher used the Aspreys handbag as a prop, rifling through it in search of papers at just the right moment if she wanted to make an underling nervous.
The experience became known as “a handbagging”, soon entering the Oxford English Dictionary and attributed to the late Conservative MP Sir Julian Critchley, who once described Thatcher as “the great she-elephant”, as well as “didactic, tart and obstinate”.
The handbag became so associated with her identity that one minister, the late Nicholas Ridley, is said to have quipped during one cabinet meeting when she had briefly left the room: “Why don’t we start? The handbag is here.”
John Whittingdale, now a Tory MP but who served Lady Thatcher for four years as her political secretary, said she saw the Aspreys “as a symbol” of authority: “She would produce it very visibly at big meetings to show she meant business,” he said.
A guide price of £100,000 has been placed on the bag, but a Salvatore Ferragamo spare sold for over £82,000 10 years ago. A cigar half-smoked by Winston Churchill after a second World War cabinet meeting sold for £4,500, while a set of his false teeth raised £16,000.