A friend messaged me around midday on 24 June 2020 to say that Rose Paterson, a contemporary of ours at Cambridge University and someone I had been close to, had been found dead in woods near her home in Shropshire. The story about Rose, the chairman of Aintree Racecourse and wife of Conservative MP Owen Paterson, had broken in MailOnline, which reported that the police had ruled out “third-party involvement”. At the inquest in September 2020, it was revealed that Rose had died by suicide and left no note.
The tragedy returned to public attention in October 2021 when a report by Kathryn Stone, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, concluded that Owen Paterson had broken the lobbying code in relation to his work for Randox and for Lynn’s Country Foods. At the time, the news of Rose’s death came as a shock and a mystery. In the days and weeks that followed I contacted a number of people who also knew Rose well, including her younger sister, and everyone seemed baffled. Some couldn’t believe she had taken her own life. One said “she had everything to live for”. Another mentioned her three children and grandchildren and thought it impossible she had killed herself. The Times obituary spoke of a gracious political consort and very well-regarded person in the racing world – devoted to her horses – who in the end had succumbed to “her demons”.
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