“I’ve always wanted to own my own property,” she says.
Her friend Trevor Abrahmsohn believes her story demonstrates the success of the scheme. “If you want to condemn the poor to poverty, make them lifetime renters,” he says.
Those arguments were central to Thatcher’s vision of a “property-owning democracy”.
Few people are more closely associated with Right to Buy than Lord Heseltine, who was the cabinet minister responsible for housing when it was introduced. When he and Thatcher launched the scheme in 1980, council tenants were offered substantial discounts to purchase their homes.
A relative of mine whose parents bought their council home in Croydon told me it was the only time “anyone would ever give you a hundred grand for free”.
Even Housing Secretary Angela Rayner – part of the government that’s restricting Right to Buy – bought and later sold her own council home for a profit.
In 1980, Lord Heseltine described the scheme as the biggest transfer of capital wealth from the state to ordinary people. “It certainly was,” he says now, almost half a century on.
I ask him if, looking back, he would have designed the policy differently. “No,” he answers.
He thinks Right to Buy gave its beneficiaries an important asset. “People who bought their own homes made a great deal of capital gain,” he says.