Wedding portrait shows the Iron Lady as you’ve never seen her before

Margaret Thatcher commissioned an oil painting to mark her wedding to her husband Denis, it has emerged.

The oil canvas by Rosalind Kent depicts the Iron Lady in the midnight blue velvet dress and wide-brimmed feather hat she wore to her wedding at Wesley’s Chapel in December 1951.

The portrait is being sold as part of a selection of 100 personal items from the Thatcher household, with the former prime minister’s speech writing desk among the objects and estimated to sell for £6,000 on Friday.

Another item being put on sale by Sloane Street Auctions is a blue Tomasz Starzewski designer coat that Thatcher wore on the steps of No 10 before a private meeting with David Cameron, the then premier, in 2010.

The coat, which is being offered with its matching ensemble, is expected to fetch between £800 and £1,200 when it is exhibited in London later this month.

The Thatcher family bought the desk in the 1960s for The Dormers, their home in Kent, and it moved with them to 19 Flood Street in the early 1970s. It was kept in the front room and used by Thatcher to make notes on her many speeches.

She penned her victory speech at the desk after sweeping into power with a landslide victory in the 1979 general election.

The 54-inch-wide antique, which has five drawers and is made of mahogany, then moved with the family to Chester Square in 1991, where it then stayed. Auctioneers expect it to sell for up to £2,000.

When she moved into the Downing Street flat, Thatcher was famously unimpressed by the untidy residence and dull official rooms, leading her to refurnish it with a George III-style camelback sofa upholstered in pale blue silk. This is also estimated to sell for an estimated at £2,000.

A mahogany cutlery canteen with a handwritten label inscribed by Thatcher is set to raise between £400 and £600. Four gold sovereigns presented to the former Conservative leader by BP in September 1992 could also sell for as much as £5,000.

Daniel Hunt, the owner of Sloane Street Auctions, said: “These items are imbued with the spirit of the times and helped form the backdrop of some of the most historic moments in our nation’s political history of the past 50 years.

“This is exactly the range and quality of items that used to be offered by Christie’s South Kensington before it closed, and we are happy to don that mantle.”