Maggie Thatcher’s longest-serving press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham left huge fortune in will, documents show

MARGARET Thatcher's longest-serving press secretary left more than £1million in his will, legal documents show.

Sir Bernard Ingham died on February 24 last year aged 90 and left an estate worth £1,084,708.

Often described as irascible, affable and humorous, his bushy eyebrows were once likened to a pair of mating squirrels.

In his one-page will, made in 2016, he left his entire estate to his wife Lady Nancy Ingham, a former police officer.

But as she died in 2017, his fortune goes to his only son John Ingham, a journalist on the Daily Express who retired in 2021.

Ingham was born in 1932 and went to Hebden Bridge Grammar School before joining his local paper the Hebden Bridge Times at the age of 16.

He moved to the Yorkshire Post, where he met his wife Nancy covering cases at the local magistrates’ court.

He joined the Leeds office of the Guardian in 1962, becoming a Labour activist, and stood unsuccessfully for the city council.

He went on to become a government press officer, and worked as Baroness Thatcher’s press secretary for eleven years.

He was a prolific journalist, and in the 1970s he also worked as a press officer for Labour MPs Barbara Castle and Tony Benn.

After leaving Downing Street, he wrote his memoirs Kill The Messenger and worked as a political pundit, newspaper columnist, a cruise lecturer, an after-dinner speaker, and a political pundit.

He retired in 1990, aged 58, two weeks after Mrs Thatcher’s resignation