Former Thatcher minister Lord Tebbit yesterday criticised peers during the Brexit debate in the House of Lords for “thinking of nothing but the rights of foreigners.”

Yet hypocritical Tebbit is quite happy to use migrant carers on minimum wages – in other words “foreigners” from countries like the Czech Republic, Slovakia and South Africa – to look after his sick wife Margaret.

One of the carers Lord Tebbit employed was Czech citizen Marketa Ziskova – who has agreed to describe her experiences working for the Tebbits in her own words:

My name is Marketa, I am Czech. I lived 9 years in the UK, worked and studied in UK. I returned home in 2013.

I worked for Lord Tebbit in the summer of 2007- for 3 months. They advertised on Gumtree. So I applied for the job. I went for an interview. At the time they had a Slovak girl working there, she was going on holiday in Slovakia so they needed cover for that time. At the time they lived close to Horsham, a small village. When I came for the interview they had pictures on the wall – Lord Tebbit and the Queen…old pictures, from Thatcher’s time… so then I found out who he is.

I got the job and started: his wife was disabled after the bombing in Brighton. Tebbit was my employer, I still have references from him and the payslips. I worked with his wife, helped her with everything – washing, dressing, hair, cooking, I went even into Norfolk with them. There was me, a girl from Slovakia and another girl from South Africa. But we worked single-handed shifts, which if you have to lift somebody without a hoist is not allowed I think. But we lifted her many times during the day.

They always had foreign carers – perhaps no-one English would agree to do that. Not for that amount of money! We had to eat with them, but we could not drink anything except water. They always had wine for dinner. We had separate food in the fridge, ours was Tesco economy. We always had to stay and sleep in their house even if we were supposed to have time off. We were paid minimum wage. We also had to call them Lord Tebbit and Lady Tebbit. It felt like they owned us.

Marketa