As Lady Olga Maitland, Conservative member for Sutton and Cheam, awaited the second reading of her anti-knives bill, it remained to be seen how long she could avoid political meltdown, wrote Robert Chalmers in the Observer on 14 January 1996. ‘A recent poll found Maitland, now 50, well placed in a competitive field for the title of most despised MP.’
The first time she remembered inspiring ‘mass loathing’ was during a visit to a Liberal convention in Harrogate. She encountered ‘a wall of hate’. Today, doing a round of her Sutton constituents, a tenant handed his MP a letter detailing the force required to arrest his schizophrenic neighbour who had issued death threats. This included at least 18 police officers, ambulance personnel and six firefighters. ‘God!’ whooped Maitland to her constituent. ‘You’re joking!’ Afterwards she mused: ‘All those people for one little nutter.’
The daughter of the 17th Earl of Lauderdale was rarely shamed. In 1983 she joined CND protesters at Greenham Common peace camp, who made her welcome. Afterwards, she wrote that what her party saw as ‘reds’ were ‘hardcore’ and ‘lesbian and not terribly attractive in their behaviour’. She duly set up Women for Defence, enabling the Conservative party’s opposition of CND. Her Serbian grandparents had been reduced to living in two rooms in Belgrade. ‘A life of communism and socialism is not a life,’ she opined.
Earlier, as an Express gossip columnist, her ‘banal’ dispatches on the lives of the privileged included: ex-King Constantine of Greece (‘sinks hole in one’) and Lady Hesketh (‘watches European Cup Final on television’). As for her 1989 biography of Margaret Thatcher, ‘its sympathetic treatment of its subject is likely to remain unsurpassed unless Baldrick ever begins work on A Life of Blackadder.’ Her own popularity remained elusive. In 1994, she put forward, as her own work, government-drafted amendments ‘which wrecked Harry Barnes’s private member’s bill aimed at significantly improving the lives of disabled people.’ She remained best known for the humiliating reprimand she received. Some in disabled charities insisted Maitland promised to support Barnes’s disability bill. ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ said Lady Olga. ‘They misunderstood me. I said I would support them in measures to help and better their lives.’
