Diana Brittan: No way to treat a Lady

She has led a blameless life of good works, the acceptable face of Tory committee woman, modern, adaptable, charming and quietly effective. Now, thanks to the Daily Mail, she is the victim of death threats, needles and excrement through the post and a hate campaign tinged with a nasty element of anti-Semitism. What did she do to deserve all this?

The time has long past when the public duties of the archetypal Tory wife involved opening the local fête and engaging in good works, the better to further her husband's career. Diana Brittan engages in good works, yet in consequence, the people in her office have to wear rubber gloves to handle her post: sometimes she is sent human excrement through the mail. Lady Brittan is a representative of the new generation of a very different sort of Tory woman.

Some of her colleagues would not even have been surprised if this wife of a former Conservative home secretary – Sir Leon Brittan – had actually voted Labour at the last election. That's how different she is. It is pure supposition and, if asked, she would probably laughingly deny it. But the important point is that it doesn't really matter how she voted. One of her long-standing colleagues compared her directly with the Prime Minister: "She's just where Tony is. She doesn't act as a result of a traditional, party-political, ideological perspective, but from a moral perspective. She does something because it's the right thing to do."

Diana Brittan chairs the National Lottery Community Fund. This is the organisation that dishes out the dosh from lottery proceeds to organisations that, by and large, try to make the world a better place. It gives money to a huge number of little-known groups; last year it donated £369m to nearly 10,000 projects. But it has attracted the attention of the Daily Mail. The newspaper has run an unpleasant campaign, bitterly complaining about grants given to what it calls "the bizarre and politically correct" – a homosexual choir and an Andes guinea pig-breeding project were among those singled out. But what the editor, Paul Dacre, was particularly incensed about was the grant given to an organisation helping unsuccessful asylum-seekers fight deportation. The paper's hate campaign against Lady Brittan continued with the suggestion that outraged readers should write to her offices to express their views personally.

And this is where the new-style Tory wife meets the unacceptable face of old-style, racist intolerance: death threats, needles and unpleasant etcetera in the post, many thousands of unprintable letters making unthinkable suggestions about implausible practices and – just because her husband happens to be Jewish – some very nasty anti-Semitism as well. Diana Brittan is not herself Jewish, but a daughter of the English middle class who had a lifestyle to match, at least until she met her husband, who served to redefine her life, as she did his. Marrying Leon Brittan when they were both 40 years old seems to have taught her, though, that she did not wish to be defined by him, identified solely as the wife of a Cabinet minister. She once described the business of politics as passionate, difficult and chancy – "disaster nearly always hits somewhere" – and she learnt early on about its shifting uncertainty: there was a Cabinet reshuffle on the day they married.

One of her Tory friends, someone who has known her since she joined the political world, believes that she has blossomed since she entered public life. She was a little shy when she married, and was clearly uncertain about her role. "In male-dominated politics a wife has to be even tougher to do what she wants to do," she said, before going on to prove it. Her expressed view, and it is one that, coincidentally, has been widely aired in the wake of Estelle Morris's resignation last week, is that women are very honest about their shortcomings in a way that men are not. But what she decided to do was to teach herself how to push herself forward, in spite of her private inhibitions about her own capabilities. She is clearly a brave woman with a strong moral sense of what is right. The strategy has proved a triumphant success. And how.

She was born Diana Clemetson in 1940 and came from that section of the middle class that in those days sent its daughters to a boarding establishment (Westonbirt School, Tetbury). But she did not go on to university. She married a brilliant scientist, Richard Peterson, when she was 25 and they had two daughters. At a party in the early 1970s she danced with Leon Brittan, then an MP in Yorkshire; he was later to say that he knew that he never wished to be married to any other woman. It was eight years, however, before they honeymooned in Rome and embarked upon a delicious romance. "Leon was always enormous good fun but after he married her he was happy as well," said one of their friends.

It was therefore all that more remarkable, given the conventional circumstances of her life to date, that in early middle age, in 1984, she became a magistrate on the City of London bench. She went on to become a member of the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) in 1989, joined the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority as its deputy chairwoman in 1990, was the deputy chairwoman of the EOC from 1994-96 and moved on to her present post in 1999. (She works part-time and is paid a salary of £22,000.) And in the way of these things, she has managed to clocked up a few other worthy positions: as a trustee and then chairwoman of the Runnymede Trust, as chairwoman of the Race in Europe Network, as a member of the Lord Chancellor's advisory committee on legal education and conduct, of the European Union of Women and the Open University Foundation. And that is just for starters.

This is committee woman, someone who honestly believes she can make the world a better place and has the time, energy and commitment to do something about it. "It's the old, old story," says Carole Stone, ace networker, public relations consultant and someone who understands the world of the committee. "If you've got three or four positions, you may well have a secretary and you can probably fit in another couple of posts." The committee world also likes applications from people with good contacts. Being married to a former home secretary and former European commissioner comes into that category.

Diana Brittan is also a fair chairwoman. She is fun, and can crack a joke. She advised Jonathan Aitken when he was facing his jail term to listen to audio-tapes, but suggested he kept off Kafka's The Trial. She allows people space in which to express their opinions, and she encompasses them, bringing people with diverse opinions together at meetings and winning credit for achieving a consensus. "She's the supreme diplomat," says one politician who has watched her in action. "She is inclusive and involves people." Indeed, she is so inclusive that after her divorce, and then marriage to Leon Brittan, her first husband would spend Christmas with them and the children. She is a kindly person, absorbed by some of her elderly neighbours' problems, too.

And it is said by those who have often watched her at meetings that, while she may not have been to university, she exhibits the skills of a trained brain. She was the managing editor of a technical press agency for 12 years from 1977, and it shows in the competence with which she runs things. She is credited with good judgement and being "fairly shrewd". Facing the present criticisms directed at the National Lottery Community Fund, she has already moved to try to introduce better controls of the way in which the money that has been granted to small organisations is spent.

But Diana Brittan, new Tory woman, will have been very hurt by the events of the past few weeks. "That sort of thing always hurts," says one of her distinguished friends, who has been through similarly distressing political assaults. It will take courage. It is a hard price to pay for trying to engage in good works.