When 60,000 Ugandan Asians were expelled from their country in 1972, the Bottomleys were intent on helping – so opened up their home
What 78-year-old Sir Peter can lay claim to is his status as longest-serving MP (his run began in 1975), and Father of the House of Commons. But in the early 1970s, when Amin seized power in a military coup in the former British protectorate, Sir Peter was putting his third-class Cambridge degree in economics to use by installing neon lights outside theatres. He’d also worked as a lorry driver.
Virginia – who went on to become health secretary in Sir John Major’s Conservative government and now sits in the Lords – was a young social worker.
Sir Peter had spent a peripatetic childhood moving between countries. By age six, he had changed schools four or five times in South Africa. By 11, he had attended a further two schools in England, and was enrolled at a junior high in the US.
His itinerant early years appear to have left their mark, and he is prone to embrace outsiders – perhaps as he had so often been one himself.