The Spicer Diaries: 'A Tory toff? My attitude is that you are what you are His great hope had been to be appointed party chairman in 1984 after serving in the prime minister's inner circle throughout a successful election campaign. "I even spent an hour and a half on my own with her discussing the role," he recalls, "and then I heard she'd appointed John Selwyn Gummer." How did that feel? "I wasn't flattered," he replies economically. His account of being Margaret Thatcher's right-hand man covers both the period of the Falklands War in 1982 and the subsequent election. What Lord Spicer does very well indeed (he has also published eight novels in his time) is provide an intimate portrait of life behind the scenes at 10 Downing Street. So we see Margaret Thatcher in tears when her son Mark is found after going missing in the Sahara desert in 1982, but worried about what he might blab to the press. And the diaries notice how she always perks up when Cecil Parkinson comes into the room. Do they? Lord Spicer asks with a twinkle in his eye when I mention it. I suppose they do, but I don't want you reading anything more into that. (Parkinson was his great political ally. When his career was effectively ended by revelations about his private life, Lord Spicer feels that his own prospects for preferment sank, too.) There is a wonderful comic scene when the prime minister realises that her brand of hairspray is manufactured overseas. "I don't want anything but English spray on my hair," she rages. And an even funnier one when he accompanies her to Felixstowe docks and she insists on climbing up a crane's ladder for a photo opportunity. She was wearing a tight blue skirt and black stockings, with the world's press waiting at the bottom. My job was to put myself between the prime minister and every one of the 50 or so cameras waiting to record the obvious images. He points out a shot of the scene that is featured on the jacket of his book. It is just as he has described it, save for his own hand hovering just below the prime ministerial bottom, trying to preserve her modesty. "Then a photographer arrived late, just as she was coming down and asked her to go up again," he recalls. I said: 'If she does, I'll have her arrested. "She was an Elizabeth I figure," he reflects. Her court, and I include myself in this, was made up of people who were there to perform. She was a very great figure, but like all very great figures was remote. She did not, he feels, keep those closest to her politically close (and by this he includes himself). It was not so much an inclusive policy - "keep your enemies close" - but rather "carelessness." This was to prove fatal, in his opinion, when opposition to her grew in the rest of the party. But he draws a distinction between being a Thatcherite and being a Thatcher intimate. "My admiration for her did not develop into unbounded affection," he writes in the diaries. There are moments, though, when he waivers. His remark on one occasion - "she has a cold and is rather attractive with it" - put me in mind of another celebrated "Tory toff" diarist, Alan Clark, who recorded finding the Iron Lady boss "attractive." If power can make unlikely men sexy, is it also true of women? "No," corrects Lord Spicer, "that isn't what I mean." There is the mild tut-tut of a schoolmaster in his voice that makes me feel smutty. When she had a cold or was tired, I mean she was more vulnerable, more empathetic. You could feel for her which often wasn't the case when she was a grand lady making fast decisions. In one of those more relaxed sessions, Margaret Thatcher wonders aloud if she would have been better ditching politics and being a housewife and mother. "That wasn't totally representative," Lord Spicer responds dryly. He remains in touch with the former prime minister but honourably declines to say anything more about her current state of health. Of Meryl Streep's recent Oscar-winning performance in The Iron Lady, he is equally tight-lipped. "The film was premature," he says, echoing what those around the former prime minister have said, "but I do take Meryl Streep's point that it is not just a newsreel re-run, that it is an accurate study of someone late in life." On Maastricht Lord Spicer is utterly unrepentant about the damage that many think he and his fellow rebels did to the electoral fortunes of their party. Everyone in the Conservative Party now seems to be claiming that they were on our side, but that is not how I remember it. The battle, he claims, had one crucial benefit. It stopped us going into the euro. And by "us" does this Cambridge economics graduate mean "Conservatives" or all governments? All governments since. That is how I see it, and therefore we are not like Greece or Ireland or Portugal. We can control our own exchange rate if our economy demands it. That is crucial right now.