Sir Denis Thatcher, who has died at the age of 88, was the ideal consort for the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.

An adaptable businessman with gentlemanly values, he did not take Westminster parochial politics seriously enough to embarrass or rival his wife, but was prepared to control his scepticism for the sake of a woman whom he always regarded as special without being in awe of.

When she became leader of the opposition in the late 70s, and the media besieged the family's Chelsea home, he was at his desk before nine the next morning, having commuted the usual 80 miles by car as though nothing had happened.

It was not until he retired that his role as consort became a larger one and, even then, his non-executive directorships kept him busy.

Sir Denis was comfortable with himself, and able to deal with people in an emollient way. He never lost the grudging respect of satirists, who had him down as an entertainingly comic figure while sensing, on meeting him, that there was rather more to him than that.

He certainly understood the unpredictability of crowds and their enthusiasm. Following his wife's final general election victory, she was roundly cheered. "In a year," said Sir Denis, "she'll be so unpopular you won't believe it."

It took longer to happen, but his prediction was essentially correct. When Margaret Thatcher entered the leadership contest, having been challenged by Michael Heseltine, her husband predicted, long before anyone else, that she was "done for".

Nor was he afraid to get straight to the point when in royal circles. Once, the Duchess of York said to him: "Oh Denis, I do get an awful press, don't I?" He mimicked zipping his lips closed and replied: "Yes, ma'am: has it occurred to you to keep your mouth shut?"

His family were colonials, hailing from Wanganui, a coastal town in New Zealand, where there is a street named after them. His grandfather set up a firm producing weed-killer for railway tracks, the origin of the family fortune. At 28, his father settled in London to run a parent company, Atlas Preservatives.

Sir Denis was born in Lewisham, south London, soon after the start of the first world war. At the age of eight, he was sent to boarding school in Bognor Regis, and at 13 he entered Mill Hill School, also as a boarder.

Although he did not shine academically, he was good at cricket and rugby, and enjoyed attending the annual Duke of York camp with its "play the game" maxim.

In 1933, he left to join the family firm, which was by then dealing in paint and general chemicals. He was expected to work his way up from the bottom but, when put on the spot, would express himself with the sort of pungency for which he was to become well-known.

As works manager, he went to Nazi Germany in 1937, and came back expressing the view that it was not a question of if war was coming, but when.

A Territorial army officer, he joined the 34th Searchlight regiment of the Royal Artillery, where his role was organisational, carrying out staff duties because of his bad eyesight. In 1945, promoted to Major and working from the British HQ at Marseilles, he organised the movement of thousands of Canadian troops from Italy to Belgium, and was awarded an MBE.

He maintained that the army had taught him how to think as well as how to act, but the war marked his life in a way that was to remain a virtual secret for a generation.

In 1941, he met Margaret Kempson at an officers' tea dance: she bore a striking resemblance to a certain Margaret Roberts, who was to enter his life much later. They married in March 1942, never lived together because of the circumstances of the war, and were divorced in 1948, believing that they had nothing in common. Sir Denis was always reluctant to talk about the matter.

He met Margaret Roberts at a dinner-dance, and was at first keener on her than she was on him. However, when he proposed to her in 1951, she accepted during the general election campaign, in which she reduced the Labour majority at Dartford by 1,000.

After she had thanked her party workers at the count, he took the microphone to reveal that the candidate was to become his wife. They were married at the Methodist church in City Road, and spent their honeymoon in Portugal, Madeira and Paris, strange territory to her. It was an indication that his social and intellectual horizons had been wider than hers.

There was something of the comic caricature in the fact that the birth of his twins, Mark and Carol, took him by surprise: he was watching a Test match when they arrived early. Both loved him greatly.

Sir Denis sold the family business when he was in his 50s. Eventually, much later, he retired - but as divisional director of planning and control at the Burmah Oil Company, which had taken over Castrol, the company that had bought his family business.

Being consort to the leader of the opposition, and then the prime minister, did not turn his life upside down, but it gave it a new visibility. He reacted by refusing all requests for interviews, and regarded journalists as "reptiles". Such indignation gave satirists something to work on. The Dear Bill letters in Private Eye magazine, apparently penned by him to a golfing chum, gave author John Wells an opportunity to show Sir Denis as a figure of fun, but never contempt.

Behind the scenes, the real Sir Denis rarely offered political advice. When he did, he counselled that the Argentinians should be defeated, but not overly humiliated, in the Falklands campaign, because humiliation would make them more difficult to deal with in the future.

A decent man ("I hope I have never hurt anyone"), he was resourceful and disciplined, and worked quietly for many charities. He was, surely, one of the most tested, impressive and amusing consorts of all time, Prince Albert not excluded. His baronetcy in 1990, for which that hereditary title was restored after a long obsolescence, was his public reward.

His wife may occasionally, however, have found some of his quips difficult to take. Once, asked by a stranger during the Thatcher era what his wife did, he replied: "She has a temporary job." It summed up his wry, dry attitude to political life in a nutshell.

· Sir Denis Thatcher, businessman and husband of Margaret Thatcher, born May 10 1915; died June 26 2003

 by Dennis Barker reprinted from The Guardian Thursday June 26, 2003