McAlpine held a variety of jobs before becoming prominent in British politics in the 1980s as the treasurer and a major fundraiser of the Conservative Party.

A close ally of Thatcher, McAlpine did not support her successor as Prime Minister John Major, and later joined James Goldsmith's Referendum Party.

[4][5] He then worked on a McAlpine building site on the South Bank, keeping time and dealing with wage packets.

[6] They continued to have a close working relationship throughout her time as prime minister[2] and he led the fundraising efforts for the Conservative's general election campaigns.

At heart he was an 18th-century amateur"[3] McAlpine's personal political views were varied and included Euroscepticism, support for electric cars and the decriminalisation of all drugs.

[6] One of the funders of the era was Asil Nadir of Northern Cyprus, who was in 2012 convicted of stealing money from the Polly Peck company.

[6] McAlpine said the Conservative party had a "moral duty" to return Nadir's donations, totaling £400,000, to the creditors of Polly Peck.

[2] In 1990 the IRA bombed[15] West Green House, a mansion in Hartley Wintney,[14] where he had lived just weeks before, and where in the past Thatcher had been a guest.

[6] After Thatcher left in 1990, he remained fiercely supportive of her, and dismissive of her successor John Major, particularly his policies on the European Union.

In 1997 McAlpine was briefly involved in the movement by some British conservatives to help Chechnya, especially by trying to support its oil industry.

[3] Owing to his influence over Thatcher, McAlpine was said to have ensured Gummer's replacement as party chairman by Norman Tebbit.

He invested $500 million on various developments, such as restoring crumbling buildings,[23] fixing up a cinema, and creating the Cable Beach Resort club[22] and the Pearl Coast Zoological Gardens.

When he revisited Broome in 2012 he was described positively in several media stories and the town leaders honoured him as Freeman of the Municipality.

[3] Later objects collected by McAlpine included beads, books, furniture, police truncheons, dolls, textiles, ties, sculpture, rare breeds of chicken, Renaissance tapestries, a five-legged lamb in formaldehyde, and a dinosaur penis.

[29] In 1970 McAlpine donated 60 sculptures to the Tate, including works by Turnbull, Annesley, and Bolus, as well as Phillip King, Tim Scott, William Tucker, and Isaac Witkin.

[30] McAlpine also donated hundreds of erotic pictures to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, including works by Bob Carlos Clarke, Karl Lagerfeld, David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and others.

[31] In the 1970s McAlpine and the classical architect Quinlan Terry constructed various follies in the grounds of West Green House.

[32] One of these, a 50 foot high column topped by an elaborately carved design, bears a Latin inscription declaring that "this monument was built with a great deal of money which otherwise someday would have been given into the hands of the public revenue".

[33] Other features in the folly garden include a trompe-l'œil nymphaeum, a smoke house, an "eye catcher", Chinese cow sheds and an island gazebo.

[33] McAlpine lived in several parts of the world including England,[6] Western Australia,[6] Paris,[citation needed] Venice[6] and Southern Italy.

[2][35] He was in a coma for a month on a life-support machine following his second heart operation,[3] after which he experienced a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.

The couple met when she was working for the youth wing of the Referendum Party, and married in Paris, with his reconciled daughters present.

[39] After The Guardian reported that the accusations were the result of mistaken identity,[40] McAlpine issued a strong denial that he was in any way involved.

[41] The accuser, a former care home resident, unreservedly apologised after seeing a photograph of McAlpine and realising that he had been mistaken, leading to a report in The Daily Telegraph that the BBC was "in chaos".

[42] The decision to broadcast the Newsnight report without contacting McAlpine first led to further criticism of the BBC, and to the resignation of its Director-General, George Entwistle.

[45][46] McAlpine expressed his intention to pursue twenty "high profile" Twitter users who had reported or alluded to the rumours.