Journal of Liberal History obituary

Ronnie Fearn was a very unusual Liberal politician. Even how he joined the Southport Liberals and very soon became a local candidate was typically novel and direct. After the big Labour electoral advances after the war and the concurrent weakness of the Liberal party, a number of local Liberal associations made electoral arrangements, formal or informal, with the Conservatives to get straight fights in a number of wards and thus preserve a semblance of a Liberal presence. Southport was different and, faced with the overwhelming Conservative domination of the town council, from the mid-1950s it increasingly divided the fifteen wards with the local Labour party to ensure successful straight fights in most wards.

Around Ronnie Fearn’s home were a number of Labour fought wards and he saw this as an opportunity. I began my active Liberal politics in Southport and, working in the town centre, one of my daily tasks was to pick up and deal with the post at the nearby Liberal office. In early 1961 I opened a letter from one Ronnie Fearn. He had noted that the next door ward to his home had no Liberal candidate and stated that he would like to fight it for the party, even though he was not at that point a Liberal member! I signed him up and gently explained to him that it was the party’s strategy to leave the ward in question to Labour. As it happened in May 1963, with the retirement of a sitting Liberal councillor, he became the candidate for his home ward which he duly won - and held for the following 52 years!

Essentially, once he had decided he was a Liberal, he was entirely loyal to the party and had little interest in the nuances of policy. He was well known in the town for his work with voluntary organisations, including his involvement with the All Souls Church amateur dramatic group whose annual pantomime played to full houses at the town’s main arts centre theatre. He was a natural entertainer and he used his naturally camp voice to great effect. Ronnie’s starring role as the dame were keenly enjoyed. His local fame and popularity stood him in good stead at the 1970 general election at which he stood in at the last minute when the adopted candidate withdrew. Nationally it was a disastrous election for the party but Ronnie managed to increase the Liberal vote by 10%.

He fought the three subsequent general elections but in 1983 the local party, in a contested selection, chose a more politically focussed candidate who, despite increasing the Liberal vote, failed to win the seat. Ronnie returned for the 1987 election and, again confounding the pundits, won - the party’s only gain in England. In 1992 he yet again went against the national trend and lost. He persevered and regained Southport in 1997. Retiring from the Commons in 2001 he managed to bequeath enough of his personal vote to John Pugh for the latter to hold the seat. Ronnie was made a Life Peer in 2001 and retired from the Lords in 2018.

Ronnie was renowned as an optimistically canvasser and colleagues delighted in recounting that having been on a doorstep at which the elector told Ronnie in rather colourful terms that he always voted Conservative and then set the dog on to him, Ronnie said to his colleague, “I think I’ll have to put him down as a ‘possible’.” John Pugh commented at Ronnie’s funeral that, “He was by no means a typical politician and if there is a book written about how to become an MP or a Lord, Ronnie never read it.”

Ronald Cyril Fearn, Lord Fearn, Liberal politician, born 6 February 1931, died 24 January 2022.

Jonathan Fryer, who has died aged 70 of a brain tumour, was a foreign correspondent and writer whose broadcasts from a total of 162 countries made his a familiar voice on BBC Radio. He also wrote about history and lectured on international politics, and spent more than half a century as a Liberal and later Liberal Democrat activist and candidate.

Jonathan's political interest was awakened in 1964 when Jo Grimond, then Liberal party leader, spoke to a meeting at Manchester grammar school. He found that Grimond's views, with their emphasis on non-statist radicalism, chimed with his own, and joined the Young Liberals. He maintained a lifelong involvement with the party and subsequently the Liberal Democrats, first as a regional officer in the North West Young Liberals and as secretary of the Oxford University Liberal Club. He was elected to Bromley borough council in 1986, remaining a member until 1990, and fought five general elections in London.

As a dedicated internationalist, Jonathan focused particularly on the European parliament, and he fought seven of the eight elections to that body between 1979 and 2014. Once convinced of a cause he remained committed and he took on many significant roles, including chairing the Liberal International British Group and the Liberal Democrats' international relations committee. He was chair of Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine and a member of the Council for Arab-British Understanding.

Jonathan was adopted at the age of 18 months by Rosemary and Harold Fryer. He had an exceptionally difficult childhood - his father, a Manchester businessman, sexually abused him. At primary school he fared badly, and his regimented early years at Manchester grammar school, studying subjects that he found uncongenial, led to failed examinations until one teacher fostered his interest in literature, geography and languages. He then won an open exhibition to St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, to study geography.

Forcing himself to be independent before he went to Oxford, Jonathan fulfilled his determination to get away from his father by travelling overland to Vietnam during the war there, partly funding his journey and stay by persuading Brian Redhead, then editor of the Manchester Evening News, to pay him for articles sent back to the paper. His experiences led him to switch to Oriental studies with Chinese and Japanese when he finally arrived at university.

After graduating he went to work for Reuters news agency, but with his developing self-confidence soon realised that he was more suited to being a freelance writer, journalist and broadcaster. He published 15 books of history, biography and current affairs, including a biography of Oscar Wilde and a frank memoir of his own childhood and youth. During his original journey through south-east Asia he had begun to be attracted to Quakerism and his subsequent lifelong attachment to the Society of Friends became a key anchor and motivation in his life.

Jonathan became a regular broadcaster for Radio 4, on From Our Own Correspondent and, in the 1990s, Thought for the Day on the Today programme, and for the BBC World Service. He also wrote for the Guardian as well as the Independent, the Economist and the Spectator.

From 1993 he taught part-time at SOAS University of London. More recently he lectured at City University on writing non-fiction. In addition he was in demand from the British Council and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for seminars on democracy and on the media at a number of overseas locations.

Although he was a popular and loyal colleague, a successful broadcaster and in great demand from international and political organisations, Jonathan's childhood cast a long shadow on his personal wellbeing and emotional confidence. This was only resolved a few years ago by many months of counselling and the realisation that he needed to gather his memories into a book.

His memoir of those years, Eccles Cakes: An Odd Tale of Survival, was published in 2016. He also wrote in the blog that he maintained for 14 years about the closure this had given him, aided significantly by the discovery of his birth family, thanks to two sisters who traced him. His mother had died but he learned from them that the young woman whom he had seen around Eccles in his early years, checking that he was all right, had been his mother.

He spoke about his experiences at the Liberal Democrat conference in 2014 and Kevin Maguire of the Daily Mirror wrote on Twitter: "Incredibly painful, important abuse speech at Lib Dems by Jonathan Fryer who had his childhood stolen. Humbling to hear him."

Jonathan is survived by his partner of more than 40 years, Ismael Pordeus, with whom he shared a home in Portugal and, latterly, in Fortaleza, Brazil, where Ismael is a professor of social sciences and ethics; and by his sisters.

Jonathan Harold Fryer, political activist, writer and broadcaster, born 5 June 1950; died 16 April 2021.

Sir Clement Raphael Freud, by Godfrey Argent - NPG x16295Clay Freud's obituaries have understandably been replete with material on his careers in the media, in horse racing, in gambling, in the arts, in clubland, as a writer and in cuisine but there was no mention of him inventing the Beaujolais Nouveau race, hardly any mention of his passionate anti smoking stance and only very oblique references to his womanising. But above all, the references to his Liberalism and to his political career have been very shallow.

Prior to the vacancy occurring in the Isle of Ely constituency in May 1973, Freud had been a supporter of, and a donor to, the Liberal party but not by any means a party activist. He described himself politically as "an anti-conservative who couldn't join a Clause 4 Labour party, and I hugely admired Jo Grimond." In a speech at the Edinburgh Festival in 2000 he described in hilarious fashion how he came to contest the by-election. He told of writing direct to the Chair of the Isle of Ely Liberal Association, which begs the question of how he got the name and address - my recollection is that the contact came via Jeremy Thorpe. He won the nomination by thirteen votes to eight - a total vote hardly evidence for a massive association membership, particularly as he stated that the thirteen were residents of a care home across the road, drafted in to make the numbers look more respectable!

Much has been made of the lack of previous Liberal support in the Isle of Ely and of it being a safe Conservative seat. Certainly there had been no Liberal candidate in the 1970 general election and the late Sir Harry Legge-Bourke had held it since 1945, but there was a fairly recent Liberal tradition there and James de Rothschild had been the Liberal MP from 1929 to 1945. East Anglia as a whole has a radical background and at the time it had, in the Eastern Daily Press, a Liberal daily newspaper.

His by-election campaign mainly consisted of public meetings in each town and village. Not surprisingly, given his media fame, they were well attended and came to be regarded as almost show business occasions. In the town of March there was a large railway goods depot and locomotive shed; Clay told his audience that his grandfather had been a railwaymen - ".... you have heard, I hope, of Signalman Freud." Virtuoso performances like this, plus solid Liberal campaigning and recent by-election victories in Rochdale and in Sutton and Cheam, provided a good springboard for another success, but the news of Freud's success - and of David Austick's in Ripon - at mid-day on Friday, 27th July, was still a pleasant surprise and a considerable boost.. The party's opinion poll rating leapt eleven points to 28%.

Freud was far more of a party stalwart and loyal MP than he has been given credit for. He took on thankless party tasks such as chair of the Finance and Administration Board and personally secured guarantees in order to increase the party's overdraft which enabled it to fight the February 1974 general election on a more formidable basis, polling the highest Liberal vote for forty-five years. He also chaired the party's By-election Unit which ensured that potential by-elections had effective financial and organisational resources. Later, during the 1983 parliament, he was an assiduous chair of the party's Standing Committee, charged with the formulation of party policy between assemblies. He and I worked closely and harmoniously and we were both astonished that in a contested election amongst MPs he was ousted by Stephen Ross, a dedicated Liberal colleague but one whose attention to and capacity for policy detail had not hitherto been exceptionally marked.

Clay Freud was commendably direct. In July 1985 David Steel did a reshuffle of parliamentary positions. Alan Beith moved on from his long service as Chief Whip. Having been Alan's Deputy, I wanted to succeed him and I appeared to have the support of parliamentary colleagues. Clay, however, sought me out to tell me that Steel had wanted to appoint me "but the Welsh won't have it." Constituency boundary changes in 1983 made his seat more marginal but he held on, only to lose in 1987. He commented casually, and without any rancour, to me after the 1986 Eastbourne defence debate episode that, "you have lost me my seat." He was very loyal to his friends and he was the only member of the parliamentary party to offer to come to Leeds West to help me in the 1987 campaign. He was a great hit and even put up, albeit with a deep sigh, with the many repetitions of the same question, "where's your dog?" At the time there was only one sit down restaurant in Leeds West. This was a very modest but good curry house. To make a private room, the proprietors cleared a space in their storeroom and set up a table for eight. Clay enjoyed the meal and, to everyone's astonishment, had the main course twice!

On this visit we had a failed example of his famed reputation as a womaniser. The daughter of two of his constituency officers was a student at Bradford University and he had invited her to join us for the evening meal, obviously as an opening gambit. No one then had mobile 'phones and he had arranged for her to telephone him at my house at precisely 6pm. All day he was obsessed by the possibility of being late back at the house. He took the call and she duly arrived at the restaurant. Clay paid great attention to her and made various suggestions as to places that one could go on to after a meal. The young lady was delightfully innocent and completely failed to take the hint. As midnight approached I felt it was time to intervene and I offered to take her back to Bradford. Clay was clearly very put out.

Given the range of other interests one might have imagined that Clay was a part-time MP. All I can say that this never appeared to be the case and he was an effective parliamentary spokesman, particularly on education, often with an unusual technique. At one Parliamentary Question time he had tabled a question on student grants; the minister gave a rambling response and sat down to await the supplementary question. Clay rose and simply asked, "Why?" Lacking any time to compose a reply, the minister simply spluttered! Clay remarked to me, "I thought that would get him!"

On one occasion in the House he managed to link an effective intervention with his complete opposition to smoking. A discussion was underway on the existence of the Royal Warrant on cigarette packets. The politically correct view appeared to be that cigarette manufacturers should not be allowed to benefit from displaying the Royal Warrant. Clay disagreed and suggested that the wording should remain but should read: "By appointment to Edward VII, George V and George VI, all of whom it killed."

He carried out as much as possible of his constituency casework by telephone and it must have quite impressive for constituents to receive a call direct from Freud after he had resolved their case. He would also follow up names mentioned in his local newspapers. If he couldn't make contact by 'phone he would regularly handwrite a note to the constituent.

One illiberal trait that always disturbed me was his occasional and often sudden rudeness to someone subordinate, often a hotel employee or a waiter who was not in a position to respond. It could be both capricious and callous. If it was in my presence I would gently remonstrate with him but there was never a response, only perhaps a lifted eyebrow before he walked off. I had the feeling that he was wary of demonstrating real depth in relationships and that his broad range of activities were his way of avoiding any single interest producing deeper demands than he was prepared to accept.

His loyalty to a colleague ensured that he stood by Jeremy Thorpe to the very end and, then when it was clearly disastrous for the party for Thorpe to continue as leader, it was Freud who personally persuaded him to resign. Jo Grimond made a cryptic comment on Freud: ".... a clever man as you might expect but also a well organised one and a staunch colleague. A horse no doubt only suitable for certain courses but on those a strong performer of whom the party hardly made adequate use." David Steel called him "one of nature's Liberals." I liked him and felt that he was a more serious and capable politician than he was given credit for.

Maurice Faure Photo: Harry Pot / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia CommonsJe suis triste de lire de la mort de Maurice Faure. J'ai quelques souvenirs de ce grand homme mais mon préféré s'est produit en 1984, lorsque j'étais député britannique et Maurice, Sénateur. Mon président de groupe parlementaire m'avait demandé si je voudrais participer à un colloque radical à Paris. Ma réponse immédiate fut: "bien sûr" et rien n'y changea lorsque quelques instants plus tard il m'avouait que le voyage avait un prix : donner une conférence en français sur le thème de l'aide social!

Etant assez motivé, je ai préparé en détail cette intervention et je suis arrivé fin prêt au palais du Luxembourg à l'heure de déjeuner. Il y avait là également des radicaux des Pays-Bas et de Danemark. J'ai le souvenir d'un repas superbe avec des grands crus magnifiques et des discussions décontractées et cordiales. Vers seize heures Maurice prit la parole pour annoncer, "l'heure de la sieste!" et le rendez-vous du soir, vingt heures de nouveau au grand restaurant du Sénat. Nous eûmes encore une fois la cuisine excellente et des vins superbes.

Le jour suivant passa de la même manière sans qu'aucun signe tangible d'une conférence ou de discours formel! Finalement je me résignais à demander à Maurice pour quand était mon intervention. Avec sa voix si particulière, il me répondait devant nos collègues hilares : "Quelle conférence? Maintenant que je suis Sénateur - et la cuisine au palais Luxembourg et mieux que le palais bourbon - je pouvais faire une réunion européenne de nos collègues radicaux digne de ce nom comme on me le demande depuis longtemps. Participants de quatre pays minimum et un ordre de jour et l'Union nous subventionne. Mes excuses, mais nous n'avons pas aucun besoin de ta conférence!"

Cette conférence reste encore dans mes archives!

Jo Grimond brought the Liberal Party back from the brink of extinction. Michael Meadowcroft, former MP for Leeds West, who worked for Grimond in the 1960s, remembers the man and his achievements.

The death of Jo Grimond on 24th October had a curious impact on friend and opponent alike. For Liberals who lived through the heady days of Jo’s leadership his affectionate obituaries were more than a tribute to the man. In reality the Grimond era had long since passed but, whilst its figurehead was still around, part of one’s mind had somehow retained a sense of connection and a willing self deceit that his period of leadership was somehow far more recent than it was. Jo’s death brings a sense of sad finality to a vivid chapter of political history. The words and ideas remain on the page but, much more than with most leaders, it was the spark of the personality behind them that gave them the added inspiration that causes many fifty pluses still to call themselves "Grimond Liberals". It is that same vivid recollection of vitality that moved editors to give over so many column inches to the obituary of a former MP who, by any cold, unemotional, mathematical calculation had achieved very little in the normally unsentimental world of politics.

It is difficult now to recall the political conditions and the state of Liberalism when Jo Grimond took over the party in September 1956, Five years of Conservative Government with a country at last clambering out of its post-war austerity and beginning to believe that one could aspire to greater prosperity. A Labour Party which in Government had completed a transformation in the structure of the economy and, with the bloom of public ownership still largely intact, which still commanded a massive vote. Finally a Liberal Party with half a dozen MPs and 2% of the vote but which had enough former Ministers and Members still pottering around to persuade the gullible that the halcyon days were but yesterday and that the party could somehow sweep into power again on the strength of folk memory alone.

Why then should a young. aspiring politician, possessed of an original mind and a self-confident talent for debunking pretension, have joined the Liberal Party at such a time? Even more puzzling is why, having by his own admission been frustrated and embarrassed by the lack of discipline and absence of coherence amongst the handful of MPs he purported to organise as Chief Whip from 1950, did he take on its leadership when Clement Davies, under pressure to retire, made his "stepping down from the bridge and handing over the helm” speech at the 1956 assembly?

Leaving aside any additional influence from his marriage into the Asquith family, the answer was to be found in a succinct phrase of another Liberal candidate of the period: "We couldn’t stand the Tories and we didn’t trust the state.” In many respects this is the constant thread of all Jo’s writing and places him in the direct succession to T H Green, Maynard Keynes, Ramsay Muir and Elliott Dodds. As for the leadership question, one must not mistake Jo’s mischievous self-deprecation for humility; he had considerable vanity and never appeared to lack faith in his ability to recreate a relevant Liberal Party. There is even a sense in which, for all the many 1970s Liberals’ regrets that he was before his time, he would have found the later Liberal Party more difficult to lead when it had developed party machinery which might not have taken quite so kindly to a leader producing policy on the hoof.

In 1956, according to Jo himself, there was no consultation as to who should take over the leadership. In fact, however, Clement Davies would not have been pressed to retire had Jo not been in the wings. A year before, at the party assembly immediately before the general election, Davies had been il and unable to make the closing speech. Jo, who was not then particularly well known to the rank and file as a platform performer, stepped in and electrified the gathering. Alan Watkins’ 1966 book The Liberal Dilemma is still well worth reading as possibly the best and shrewdest analysis of Jo Grimond’s contemporary leadership.

Style

Charisma is a much over used word but Jo certainly possessed it. He was the finest platform performer of his time. His speeches were always impressive but no-one present at the two or three of his most memorable performances will ever forget the emotion and excitement of the occasion. He didn’t have to demand one's loyalty and work: he inspired it. I remember a Liberal Councillor saying to me immediately after the "sound of gunfire” speech at the 1963 Brighton Assembly, that "if he'd said ‘all those who will march with me come to the front now’, I'd have been first there." Jo’s set piece speeches tended to follow a similar pattern: a resounding opening for ten minutes or so. which startled the audience into attention. dropping into a more reflective fifteen minutes or so of Liberal commentary on the current political agenda - always including new, often startling. policy. He would then begin gently and deliberately to increase the rhythm and volume into the final peroration, with its resounding phrases and call to action, leaving the audience wanting more. On one assembly occasion, alas, I cannot now remember which, the delegates refused to let him go without an encore!

Whereas Jo Grimond’s lasting contribution to politics comes, and will continue to come, from his intellect and political judgement, it was his additional attributes which enabled him to make such a powerful impact on the his contemporary political scene. The handsome good looks, the crinkly smile which disarmed and attracted so many television viewers, the immense physical stature and the resonant voice, all gave added value to the clarity of mind and vivid choice of phrase to encapsulate a point. Because he was so manifestly capable and attractive he could disguise the weakness of his party.

The Times summed this up well on the occasion ofhis resignation as leader in January 1967:

So long as Mr Grimond was leader, his personality hid from his party the true frustrations of its position. Because he looked the equal of the other party leaders it was possible to believe that the party itself might one day win the same equality.

In a later interview, to illustrate the difference with the current style of leadership with banks of researchers and speech writers, Jo said that he wrote all his own speeches. This was not strictly true as Harry Cowie and, occasionally, I prepared items for his speeches and television scripts. What was true was that, however much we endeavoured to imitate Jo’s distinctively staccato style, the phrases and cadences were never as good as Jo’s own. Given that he could be very lazy, he tended to incorporate any text supplied as written and we therefore eventually resorted to producing notes only, in order to ensure that he rewrote the items in his own style.

There are no embarrassing campaigning pictures of Jo. He abhored gimmicks and invariably refused to go along with typical suggestions for what would later become known as "photo opportunities”. In the sense that it was too important to be damaged or demeaned, politics to Jo was a serious business, though none the less enjoyable for that. He was not, however, in any sense a dour personality. Far from it. He was one of the most amusing individuals I have ever met in politics with an ability to use wit and humour to enliven small meetings and large rallies alike. Indeed, one reason why he virtually refused to start election campaign days before 11am was not because, as he would say. "Must read the papers, y’know", but because the night before he would usually have been regaling those members of his entourage who drove him home to Kew, with a string of hilarious stories, often interpolated with the curious expletive "Hell's teeth" - and white wine - until the small hours.

One such story, no doubt apochryphal, but told to illustrate how distant the Shetlands are from London, was of a Whitehall bureaucrat during the war who sent a call up directive to the men of Unst to report to their nearest railway station. When after two telegrams no-one appeared at Wick in the far north of Scotland, the civil servant duly went, complete with bowler hat, to Unst and demanded why the directive had been ignored. It was perfectly simple. they said - the nearest railway station was in enemy hands. This being Bergen in Norway:

Occasionally we party hacks had to iry and persuade Jo to add the leadership's weight to some vital organisational matter we were working on. Jo invariably feigned total ignorance of such mundane matters. Once I had to get him to mention in his Assembly speech the need for all candidates to have agents in place as soon as possible. "Agents?" mused Jo, "Yes ... I remember I once had an agent. Man called Robertson. After I’d hired him I discovered he suffered from seasickness. Now mine is not an appropriate constituency for anyone suffering from such a malady. I spent the entire election campaign holding his head over the side of boats and arranging hotels for him on the islands.”

Jo Grimond's politics

For all Jo’s habit of producing new ideas apparently off the cuff he was first and foremost an analyst rather than a synthesist. He had a remarkable ability to spot the weaknesses in an argument and to highlight such flaws with short but devastating questions. After leaving some unfortunate advocate of party policy floundering in acute discomfort. Jo would sit back with a wry smile and murmur, “Hmm, I thought so.” In later years at Parliamentary Party meetings Jo would often remain silent for most of the meeting and then ask a single question, usually to highlight some nonsense that a spokesman had committed the party to.

As a trustee at Rowntree Social Service Trust meetings - a duty he took very seriously, particularly when cash for some pet Scottish project might be forthcoming - he would demolish one after another well-meaning but inadequately thought out grant application bearing on the current political agenda. Often, in the ensuing silence, it would be left to Richard Wainwright to suggest some course of action to rescue the idea.

Another rather typical Jo tactic would be occasionally to suggest some extremely odd course of action on a current issue. Given Jo’s usually sure-footed judgement, there would usually be a pause while we silently pondered how to deal with the situation. "Where did you get that idea, Jo?” someone would venture. “Oh, someone put it to me recently." "Who, Jo?" "Oh, someone I met." "Where, Jo?” "Oh, if you must know, on the District line this morning.” It would turn out that, whilst strap hanging on his way by tube from Kew to Westminster, he would be harangued by fellow commuters and would thereby absorb some rather bizarre ideas from time to time.

He was, of course, absolutely direct and determined on key issues. The Suez crisis burst on the scene almost as soon as he had taken over the leadership. Without hesitation - and, apparently, consultation with colleagues - Jo denounced the military action against the Egyptian occupation of the canal. Over the EEC Jo was forthright and consistent over the need to unite Europe and for Britain to be within the Community from the start. And if these seem obvious policies in the 1990s it was far from being necessarily the case in the party in the 1950s.

On one of the early equivalents of the election "Phone In". Robin Day said to Jo: “We've had a question" from a Mrs Smith of Newtown who wants to know whether you are in favour of a united Europe; and, Mr Grimond, she wants a Yes or No answer.” "Yes," replied Jo. Robin was slightly nonplussed for a moment. “But, Mr Grimond, it’s a very difficult question just to answer like that?” "Yes," said Jo, “it is, and I’ve decided it."

On other occasions Jo could produce the perfect image to demolish illiberal opponents. When Labour went through its phase of not wanting to decide whether or not they were in favour of joining the EEC “until they knew what the price was", Jo caricatured their attitude as waiting to decide whether one was for or against the Reformation until one knew what the monasteries would fetch.

His four books are sometimes said to depict his own changing views, with The Common Welfare (1978) being, in Keith Kyle’s words, "premature Thatcherite”. Certainly, a superficial comparison with Jo’s earlier books, and particularly with carefully chosen quotes from them, would suggest that he had drifted to the right. Liberals to whom such a thought was nigh on heresy, largely pretended that they hadn't heard aright. In fact, it was not so much an aberration as an emphasis - perhaps even an over emphasis - on a consistent theme of Jo’s thought: that of the need for individual and community self-help rather than relying on the state. It also needs to be borne in mind that during all his time as leader, and for many years after. his task was to define Liberalism in contrast to the “Butskellist” two party consensus. By 1978 the country was suffering from Labour incompetence and was sliding towards its socialist irrelevance. [ suspect that Jo would have expressed himself very differently ten years later in the face of actual Thatcherism. He did after all tell Keith Kyle in their 1983 interview that his accusation was only possible in hindsight and that individualism had gone too far and, perhaps, more equality was required, adding that, when pressed to continue as leader in 1976 he found himself "more individualist and less statist” than the then Parliamentary Liberal Party. "After all", he said, "realignment [of the left] had been seen as a Grimond eccentricity.”

In the immediate post election atmosphere of 1959 Jo put the antt-statist position from the opposite angle:

I would like to see the radical side of politicy - the Liberals and most of the Labour Party - make a new appeal to people to take a more active part in all sorty of real political issues ... There must be a bridge between socialism and the Liberal policy of co-ownership in industry through a wpe of yvndicalism coupled with a non-conformist outlook yuch ays was propounded on many issues bv George Orwell,

Even at the time of the 1976 Assembly Jo had similar words of advice for new party leader David Steel:

What Steel has to do now is to forge a new libertarian radicalism and get it past the party to the public at large.

Jo Grimond ensured that the Liberal Party was firmly opposed to the whole concept of an independent British nuclear deterrent - a policy reversed by the Liberal Democrats - which he regarded as both wrong in principle and realistically impossible. Although, so far as I know, he never espoused an anti-deterrence position he did, in 1962, state, in characteristically vivid terms, that:

Time is short. Deterrence is not a policy for eternity - except in a sense we should none of us welcome.

Another constant target for Jo's pen was the dangerous effect of a stifling bureaucracy. The Unservile State Booklet The Bureaucratic Blight set the argument out at length but he had earlier summed his case out in a deliciously wicked picture:

If the Good Samaritan had found the wounded traveller today he would, like the Pharisee, have passed by on the other side of the road, but for different reasons. He would have argued that this was a case for the Director of Maladjusted Cases. The traveller would have gone untended because the director would be either dealing with a mountain of correspondence or at a conference on socially deprived travellers.

Jo’s political legacy deserves much lengthier attention than can be given here. Certainly his extensive literary output is still well worth reading. The comparison with the total lack of published work by his successor Jeremy Thorpe is itself a commentary on the post Grimond problems of the Liberal Party. Incidentally Jo’s only on the record comment on the Thorpe affair was that “politics is an endless adventure in which all sorts of peculiar things happen"!

Grimond’s Strategy

Jo’s constant call was for realignment. He was fond of complaining about the Liberal Party’s impossibilism, caricatured by him as, if pushed, recognising that it could not sweep to power on its own in one fell swoop, but deeply suspicious of any hint of co-operation with another party. The party signalled its position by fighting the 1960 Bolton East by-election, thus formally marking the end of its arrangements with the Conservatives of Bolton and Huddersfield which had hitherto given the Liberals two precious seats. In December 1961 Jo sent a sympathetic note to Gaitskell when the Labour leader was struggling to modernise his party in the teeth of opposition from the left.

The first Wilson Government, in 1964, almost produced the arithmetic that would have given Jo the leverage he had worked for since 1956. It produced his famous Scarborough Assembly speech of 1965, saying that “the Liberals had their teeth in the real meat of power" (Jo always complained that the reported phrase “the red meat of power” was a misquote, even though it was probably more memorable.) Later Jo would say that he regretted making the speech and said that he made no formal approach to Labour as "rejection by Labour was certain and, therefore, why stir up Liberals?"

Jo very much approved of the non conformity of the later ’60s and this made him the darling of the young Liberals in their "red guard" phase, even though he was rather scathing of their pretensions, later saying - wrongly - that they never had more than two hundred members.

Despite the long years, with their many disappointments, Jo Grimond was not for Lib-Labbery at any price. He was against the Lib-Lab pact of 1977 because it did not deliver proportional representation, which he believed was possible. He Saw it as a failure of David Steel’s negotiations and that, in any case, if the issue had been electoral reform or an election the party would have done better then than in 1979. He also commented to Tony Benn - a most unlikely pact "pairing" if ever there was one - that one was “either in government or nothing." Despite his original opposition, he thereafter loyally backed the pact, just as he did the Alliance, even though he had great misgivings as to the libertarian credentials of the Social Democrats.

The years of Jo’s leadership were certainly halcyon days but the last year or so following the 1966 election was difficult for everyone at headquarters. He wanted to resign but "HQ” wouldn’t let him. He became stubborn, agreeing to do things and then claiming he hadn’t. He had said when he became leader that he gave us ten years to "get on or get out", He was right and that last year was one too many. | was in charge of his arrangements for the 1966 election and I personally believe that one devastating incident took more out of Jo than maybe we realised at the time. In the middle of the campaign his eldest son, Andrew. died suddenly in Edinburgh. Jo could only take a few days off the treadmill and, when he returned, he seemed to have aged considerably. I suspect that this extra blow devoured more of Jo's enthusiasm to continue than we appreciated. Just as he had a personal distaste for political gimmicks and for anything which might detract from the importance of politics so he also preserved a reticence over family life. The steadfastness of Laura and her own solid Liberalism. being a candidate herself, as was their younger son John, were their own testimony to a close and shared family life.

I end this appreciation with an extract. Without comment, from an article Jo wrote during the Alliance, in September 1987:

The name Liberal is still too much seen as the label of a sect and the beliefs of liberalism have lacked the backing of a movement which can give them meaning to the public as much in the great cities of the north and among those who benefit so much from the new technology as those of us who have been active in the old Liberal Party. I believe that a majority of people want liberalism but so far they have not been offered it.

for Liberal History Journal

Official portrait of Lord Greaves Photo: Roger Harris, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons Tony Greaves never seemed to age. He had a firm belief that politics was capable of transforming society, and his consistent advocacy of local campaigning, community politics and the necessity for both to be anchored in a radical Liberalism had hardly changed from his Young Liberal days. His election to the Lancashire County Council, in 1973, disqualified him legally from his job teaching geography and from then on to his sudden death almost fifty years later he became one of that committed band of Liberals who put the cause before comfort and struggled to find a succession of jobs that would enable him to keep politics as his first priority.

His life before politics captured him was that of a scholarship boy separated from his background by intelligence and an ability to pass exams. Born in Bradford into a family with no direct political involvement, he passed the extremely competitive examination for the direct-grant Bradford Grammar School, but an employment move by his police driving-instructor father took him instead to Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield. His successes at ‘O’, ‘A’ and ‘S’ levels enabled him to go to Hertford College, Oxford, and to gain a BA in geography. He followed this with a Diploma in Economic Development at Manchester University. By this time, he had discovered a passion for politics and particularly for political debate. By personality – and influenced by the non-statist radicalism of the then party leader, Jo Grimond – Greaves naturally gravitated to the Liberal cause. He never varied from this commitment except that he soon realised that it was necessary to link theory to activism and to local campaigning. His student Liberal and Young Liberal years were taken up by the burgeoning debates on radical issues of the day, and he was a founding force in the ‘Red Guards’ revival of the Young Liberals in the later 1960s. They became a force at the annual party assembly; in Brighton in 1966, they voted for the party’s commitment to NATO to be referred back and came within one vote of committing the party to putting the nationalised industries under worker control. At a quarterly party council meeting the following year, they were instrumental in committing the party to supporting political asylum in the UK for US citizens leaving their country to avoid being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War and to committing the party itself to aiding such asylum seekers. At this time, 1965–68, he was also agent for Geoff Tordoff in the Knutsford constituency. The Young Liberals were also prominent in the ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ campaign of direct action to prevent the apartheid South African cricket team touring England in 1970.

In 1968 he married Heather Baxter, a schoolteacher and herself a committed Liberal who became a long-term councillor on the Barrowford Urban District Council and the Pendle Borough Council. Never previously a domesticated ‘new man’, with the birth of their daughters, Victoria (1978) and Helen (1982), Greaves moved from being baffled by others’ attachment to children to being a doting and committed father including looking after daughter Victoria when Heather returned to teaching. Later, he became an even more smitten grandfather with the birth of Robin in January 2019. Typical of Tony was to start a second-hand bookshop in 1993, specialising in Liberal history, from his home and then, after five years, to let it drift, though he still carried on some book-selling until the week before he died. It was also typical that he remained a lifelong supporter of Bradford Park Avenue Football Club despite it playing way down in the sixth tier of English football. He returned to regular attendances at Park Avenue in 2008, even becoming a season ticket holder shortly afterwards.

Despite being an exceptionally transparent individual, he was regularly misunderstood and misinterpreted by political opponents within and without the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats. He was a dogged adherent to principle rather than a malevolent opponent on any personal grounds. Attempts to pull rank on him, as Jeremy Thorpe attempted to do in 1970 as party leader over the Young Liberals’ public policy on Palestinian rights, were always going to be met by intransigence, whereas he was always amenable to discussing ways and means of finding acceptable solutions.

In 1981 with a by-election in Croydon North West imminent, the then Liberal leader, David Steel, tried to bounce the party into replacing the adopted Liberal candidate, Bill Pitt, with the SDP president, Shirley Williams. The party took the lack of any consultation badly and responded by backing Pitt, who subsequently won the by-election. Thirty years later this still rankled with David Steel, who drew attention to it in his chapter in a book of essays in honour of Shirley Williams.¹ At the time of its publication I consulted Tony Greaves as to whether he agreed that, had David Steel come to party officers and put the case for Shirley Williams standing, we could have delivered the party. He replied, ‘Of course.’

Tony also acted as conciliator at the Liberal Assembly in Southport in 1978. The long-term leader, Jeremy Thorpe, was the subject of hugely embarrassing press stories about his alleged homosexual relationship with Norman Scott and the alleged plot to murder Scott – of which he was subsequently acquitted in court. The party eventually succeeded in persuading Thorpe to resign and obtained an undertaking, which he subsequently broke, that he would not attend the party assembly. At the assembly, Dr James Walsh, Liberal candidate for Hove, tabled a motion censoring the party officers for their treatment of the party leader. The three key party officers at the time, Gruffydd Evans, party president,² Geoff Tordoff, party chair,³ and myself as chair of the Assembly Committee, decided to take the motion head on and to tell the delegates what party officers had not been able to divulge of Thorpe’s behaviour in recent years. If the motion were carried all three of us would resign. Tony Greaves and a Radical Bulletin colleague, John Smithson, unaware that the trio wanted to force a vote, headed it off by successfully canvassing delegates to have the motion withdrawn.

Tony Greaves wrote a great deal but invariably it was either practical campaigning guides or short pithy commentaries on current political issues or on Liberal Democrat failings. Typically, his six entries in the British Library catalogue are all campaign guides for local elections.⁴ He was temperamentally more suited to being a skilful editor and an amenable and constructive joint author than the long haul of being a sole drafter of more formidable philosophical pieces. His long series of Liberal News short sharp commentaries would make a study in themselves. His views remained consistent throughout his long political career but he tended to become bored with a task that took too long. Opponents often believed that he was tough and thick-skinned, but this was a style he affected, usually when exasperated with them, and was a misjudgement of his real self, which was warm and sympathetic. I recall that Tony wrote to Jeremy Thorpe criticising his leader’s speech at the 1970 party assembly, just a couple of months after the death of Caroline, Jeremy’s wife, in a road accident. Tony showed me Jeremy’s reply which had upset him: he thanked Tony for his comments and then wrote, ‘there were times this year when I wondered whether there would be any speech.’

His first significant foray into publishing was his editorship of the Young Liberals’ Blackpool Essays produced for the party assembly of 1967.⁵ Tony’s introduction contains a typicallyforthright statement: ‘The Executives of NLYL⁶ and ULS⁷ meeting together informally … seemed to agree that the party lacked a political direction. It was, we arrogantly felt, our job to give it that direction.’ The rest of his introduction is much more self-effacing than he would become. He would not in later years have presented a publication with the comment, ‘Here, then, are the essays. Lambs to the slaughter.’

His next strategic initiative was more significant. Following the disastrous general election in June 1970, at which well over half the Liberal candidates lost their deposits and only six MPs were elected, Tony Greaves worked with Gordon Lishman to present the party assembly in Eastbourne, three months later, with a wholly new party strategy. In what became known as the ‘community politics amendment’, Greaves argued for a ‘dual approach’, working within and without parliament, empowering communities to take initiatives themselves, particularly on local issues, rather than waiting for their elected representatives to take action. It was a strategy that put the Young Liberals’ radical thinking into a political framework and also built on the early signs of Liberal success at local elections.

Accompanying the strategy was a programme of delivering local leaflets urging action and reporting on action taken. Despite the fact that the strategy was not to replace a parliamentary focus but to add to it, it was strenuously opposed by establishment figures in the party. Despite this opposition, the amendment was carried by 348 votes to 236.⁸ The strategy was taken up enthusiastically by younger and by urban Liberals and led to the burgeoning of the party’s local government base. Ironically, the dramatic increase in the party’s national vote, and its revival at the February 1974 general election, came more from a succession of five parliamentary by-election gains.

Greaves fought his local Nelson & Colne constituency at the two elections in 1974. His three years on the district council, and being elected for the larger county division the year before, produced a respectable vote share of 23 per cent in the February general election but this slumped to 12.4 per cent and a lost deposit in October (the vote needed to retain a candidate’s deposit was then 12.5 per cent). Fast forwarding to his only other local parliamentary contest, in 1997 in the redrawn Pendle constituency, and following sixteen years of highly successful Liberal and Liberal Democrat local government successes and considerable personal popularity, he still only polled 11.6 per cent. It was another salutary lesson – in common with most other cities, and even more marked in the three most recent general elections – that community politics on its own did not produce a sufficiently entrenched core Liberal vote to bring wider success.

After his enthusiasm for Jo Grimond’s leadership and in particular Grimond’s openness to ideas, he was disappointed with his very different successor, Jeremy Thorpe, who believed that it was necessary to be an autocratic leader and, therefore, to try to end the Young Liberals’ radical influence, which he found personally embarrassing. Greaves has stated that ‘Thorpe was a hopeless leader with no philosophical depth of any kind. … He thought he was an organisation man but his efforts there flopped too.’⁹

In 1976, after Jeremy Thorpe had been persuaded to resign the party leadership, Greaves – perversely, many thought, given his commitment to campaigning and activism – backed David Steel rather than John Pardoe, stating that ‘At first he thought Steel was a “man of the future”, Grimond-style Liberal.’¹⁰ But fairly soon he came to change his judgement, not least through Steel’s Lib-Lab Pact initiative in 1977. Greaves believed that, in keeping with Steel’s own perceptions of politics, it was ‘too Westminster’ and ‘was not translated into an effective ground-strategy’.¹¹ He also commented, ‘There was nothing in it for the party. I am not against coalitions. For example, I am a great fan of the current, very successful coalition inScotland, but in the Lib–Lab Pact we gave everything and got nothing.’¹² Greaves’ opposition to Steel’s leadership grew steadily over its course, as Steel increasingly demonstrated his disdain for the party organisation and his predilection for running the party by diktat rather than by cooperation;¹³ and it eventually led to his call for Steel’s resignation when he bounced the party into immediate moves to merge with the SDP following the 1987 general election.¹⁴

Greaves was a consistent advocate for community-based campaigning throughout his political life. He wrote a somewhat romanticised chapter on how he saw it being applied in Pendle.¹⁵ Sometimes he was too forgiving of the later distortion of the principle into the incessant delivery of the ubiquitous Focus leaflet, which all too often boasted of the Liberal and Liberal Democrat councillors’ successes rather than providing communities with the ammunition to achieve their own successes. Allied to his visceral commitment to local campaigning was his complete absence of pomposity. Even after his appointment to the House of Lords on Charles Kennedy’s nomination in May 2000, he was just as happy to be at a Pendle Borough Council meeting as he was annoying the lordships on the red benches. He remained as loyal and supportive as ever of his long-term Liberal colleagues, but the one change over the years was that his exasperation threshold grew lower with those he felt were wasting his time.

After four years surviving on council allowances and short-term agents’ jobs, he took on a key role as the newly created, and Rowntree Reform Trust funded, organising secretary for the Association of Liberal Councillors (ALC) from 1977 to 1985. A particular attraction of the job was that he could avoid being based at party headquarters in London, setting up a new office in the Birchcliffe Centre, a converted Baptist chapel in Hebden Bridge. Such was his success that, by the time he moved on in 1985, the staff had expanded from Greaves on his own to seven, and the number of Liberal councillors on principal authorities had grown from 750 to 2,500. It was his political skills, organisational drive and ability to produce effective practical guides that underpinned the successes. Following his eight years running ALC, Greaves remained at the Birchcliffe Centre to manage Hebden Royd Publications, which ran the national party’s publishing and marketing operation until the new post-merger party relocated it back to London. After this, Greaves survived by a series of agent and political organiser jobs, plus his bookseller role referred to above.

Greaves’ time with ALC and with party publications spanned the whole fraught period of the Alliance with the SDP and the subsequent merger. His views at the time of the launch of the SDP, as set out in a highly analytical article,¹⁶ were a mixture of principle and pragmatism. He deplored the need for the creation of the SDP which he ascribed to the failure of Liberals adequately to define and promote radical Liberal values, particularly as he identified the policy positions of the SDP as to the right of the Liberal Party. He was not entirely negative on the potential for an alliance but went on to oppose an electoral pact that involved giving away swathes of Liberal-fought seats. At the 1983 general election it was noted that:

in a move which, after the election, was to lead to David Steel to call for his resignation, Tony Greaves of the Association of Liberal Councillors had already circulated to Liberal candidates a line-by-line briefing on the differences between the manifesto and Liberal policy designed to demonstrate how the SDP had watered it down.¹⁷

This ‘sabotage’, according to Steel,¹⁸ was tacitly acknowledged by the authors of the definitive history of the SDP: ‘leading ALC people – people like Tony Greaves and Michael Meadowcroft – saw themselves as being as distant from social democracy as from conservatism.’¹⁹ Greaves related later that the Alliance was initially stimulating and broughtmany more council seats but soon proved to be debilitating.²⁰ In particular he stated, ‘it resulted in the intellectual energies on the Liberal side being devoted to promoting Liberal policy to the SDP and defending it (often against what we thought was a more right-wing or more centralising view from our SDP oppos.)’ He went on:

Worse was to follow. The existential crisis that really did follow the merger, combined with a widespread view that the new party should not be plagued by the ‘old’ Liberal versus SDP arguments which had wasted too much energy for too long, meant that discussing policy in the new party was like treading on eggshells. The previously agreed, the non-controversial, and the blandest non-value-laden stuff was the order of the day.²¹

Immediately following the 1987 general election Greaves, jointly with Gordon Lishman, produced a comprehensive paper on the brief history of the SDP and the Alliance, the nature of liberalism and social democracy, coupled with an appeal to all those in the Liberal Party who were inevitably going to be drawn into the maelstrom of a debate on the existence of their party and the future of liberalism.²² Their appeal was not heeded and the party voted massively for what Greaves clearly saw as the chimera of an easy route to electoral success.

When, following the disappointing set-back at the 1987 general election, David Steel pushed the parties into an early merger, Greaves was one of eight Liberals elected to the Liberal negotiating team in addition to the ex-officio members. Together with Rachael Pitchford, the chair of the Young Liberals, he produced a blow-by-blow account of the five months he and I spent closeted together with a number of like-minded colleagues in the vain endeavour to produce a merger document that would keep the Liberal Party together.²³ I have written a short note on Tony’s role in the negotiations;²⁴ suffice to say that Tony was one of the four members who resigned from the negotiating team, unable to accept the final report.²⁵ He spoke against the pro-merger motion at the special Liberal Assembly in Blackpool in January 1988 but, despite his warnings, it was carried on a wave of emotion. His final judgement on the merger was ‘Merger has failed to achieve something better. The new party is universally labelled a “centre party” in a way the Liberal Party never was.’²⁶ His lasting contribution to the new party is the preamble to its constitution, produced – as a third version – by him and Shirley Williams under great time constraints towards the end of the negotiation process and which has survived largely intact.²⁷

Greaves’ personal position in the Liberal Democrats was succinctly summed up in his contribution to a 1996 book of testimonies:²⁸

He went on to set out why socialism has now had its chance, why he opposes ‘all the malignant forces of corporatism and the greedy and intolerant right which are growing in strength throughout the world’, and sets out his definition of liberalism. He concludes:

So I do my best to encourage the Liberal Democrats to become truly liberal, and liberals to truly embrace the Party. And I produce Focus leaflets and try to help create a liberal local community. What else can I do?

What has happened to the Liberal Democrats since, particularly in its ongoing problem of establishing a clear, defined philosophic identity, able to withstand the chill winds of illiberalism, can in many respects be a vindication of his predictions. One strand that united many of those who opposed the merger, including Greaves, was an understanding that the Labour Party was not a radical reforming party but an autocratic and hegemonic party. Given his leading and often controversial role in national Liberal politics at this time and henceforth, it is surprising that he never appeared on the BBC’s Question Time and only once, on 3 March 1988, on its Any Questions? programme.

Greaves was an admirer of Paddy Ashdown’s principled and consistent espousal of two unpopular causes: the right of all citizens of Hong Kong to acquire British citizenship if the Chinese Communist Party’s increasing dominance became intolerable; and the need for the UK government to intervene to protect the citizens of Bosnia from the military atrocities and war crimes of the Serbs. Ashdown’s continual questioning of the John Major government on Bosnia led a number of Conservative MPs to refer to him as the Member for Sarajevo. However, in a Journal of Liberal History review,²⁹ Greaves was ‘stunned’ by the revelations on domestic policy in the first volume of Ashdown’s diaries.³⁰ Greaves expresses amazement that Ashdown could conceivably believe that he would be able to carry the party with him if he had succeeded in forging some sort of secret political alliance, or even coalition, with Tony Blair’s Labour Party. He wrote in his review of Ashdown’s attempts to persuade Blair of the need for a Lib-Lab arrangement, ‘The result was that Liberal Democrats loved their leader but, insofar as they sensed his strategy, most wanted none of it.’

In 2000 Charles Kennedy, the then Liberal Democrat leader, had the imaginative idea of nominating Greaves as a life peer. He took to his role in the Lords as if it were an enlarged Pendle Borough Council with broader opportunities to achieve worthwhile policies. He had no qualms as to its undemocratic basis, comparing it to the manifest fact that the Commons was also undemocratic in that it did not represent the results of general elections, plus, of course, arguing for a democratic House of Lords elected by the Single Transferable Vote. In her contribution to Liberator magazine’s tribute to Greaves, fellow peer Liz Barker wrote: ‘We saw Tony arrive, harrumph loudly about the flummery of the place, and then settle down to use the Lords to campaign on the subjects about which he was knowledgeable and passionate.’³¹ In the same obituary, she wrote that: ‘People expected Tony to be sexist. He wasn’t.’ She may have had in mind an uncharacteristic and insensitive comment by Greaves in defence of fellow Liberal Democrat peer, Chris Rennard, who had been accused by a number of party women of harassment:

Lib Dem peer Tony Greaves … made an astonishing attempt to defend Lord Rennard by describing the complaints as ‘mild sexual advances’ and saying ‘half of the House of Lords’ had probably behaved in a similar way. Lord Greaves wrote on an internal party message board: ‘We don’t know the details of anything that may have happened. But it is hardly an offence for one adult person to make fairly mild sexual advances to another. What matters is whether they are rebuffed.’³²

It is interesting to note how often commentators who were not close friends or colleagues of Greaves got him wrong. They tended to see the one side of him – as described by a fellow Liberal Democrat peer, ‘uncompromising, argumentative, curmudgeonly, stubborn’³³ – without seeing the other side of him: ‘He was our heart and sinew. I can’t begin to tell you how much we will all miss him.’³⁴ The Daily Telegraph obituarist wrote that he ‘was a thornin the side of party leaders from David Steel to Nick Clegg.’³⁵ It also goes on to state that ‘Paddy Ashdown described one policy session in 1998 with Greaves at full throttle as “probably the worst meeting I have ever attended”.’ In fact the relevant Ashdown diary entry only mentions Greaves in passing and clearly it was David Howarth, the later MP for Cambridge and not a natural firebrand, who was the main protagonist.³⁶ Crewe and King in their history of the SDP describe Greaves as ‘the heaviest cross … the modern Liberal leader has had to bear. … In the SDP team’s eyes, Greaves was the Liberals’ Tony Benn – just as fanatical, just as wild, just as committed to “participatory democracy” of a fundamentally undemocratic kind’.³⁷ If this assessment is correct, it is curious that the SDP team turned to Greaves to work with Shirley Williams on the preamble to the constitution for the newly merged party that was accepted by both delegations.

These one-dimensional views of Greaves are the result of lazy journalism or minimal research. It was necessary to know Greaves socially or to have worked with him on campaigns or other political initiatives over some time to know and appreciate him fully. Similarly, he had infinite time for constituents in Pendle who had a genuine problem that required his attention. Underneath the often-forbidding carapace was a warm and sensitive individual. He was the personal epitome of the application to politics of Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics, that ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,’ and to approach him with a positive and constructive request or suggestion would elicit an equivalent response, but to attack or criticise negatively would be summarily dismissed. Certainly, he could be exasperating from time to time with all his friends and colleagues, but we knew and appreciated his loyalty and solidarity and that he never harboured any animosity towards those he regarded as ‘sound’. What exasperated his colleagues more than anything was the reality of his lack of commitment to a longer-term literary or philosophical project that required significant research and composition. Certainly, the concept of having to revise and rewrite anything was alien to him. The consequences of this trait of ‘moving on’ to another issue was that, although he had considerable influence on Liberal politics over more than fifty years, it could have been so much more.

He took his politics very seriously and, when he did take a break from it, he needed a very different environment. He found the means of escape and of recharging his batteries by taking to the solitude of open spaces. For many years, even after he was ill in 2011, he always spent some weeks climbing, including family holidays in Barèges in the French Pyrenees. and latterly he would holiday with his family on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He was still hiking and cycling in late 2020. Allied to the geography, he was a long-time fan of the Scottish folk-rock band Runrig. Increasingly he became a rather unlikely family man. He was a patron of the Friends of the Lake District. He took great delight in helping to get the Countryside and Rights of Way Act into law and to be involved in supporting the Marine and Coastal Access Bill. He regarded his work on these latter issues as a way of repaying ‘a little of the huge amount I have got from the mountains and moorlands of this country over so many years as a climber, hill walker, geographer and botanist.’³⁸

1. David Steel, ‘The Liberal View’, in Andrew Duff (ed.), Making the Difference: Essays in honour of Shirley Williams (Biteback, 2010).
2. Created Lord Evans of Claughton, March 1978.
3. Created Lord Tordoff of Knutsford, May 1981.
4. See: https://tinyurl.com/rv2j4nru (consulted 18 April 2021).
5. Tony Greaves (ed.), Blackpool Essays: Towards a radical view of society (Gunfire Publications, 1967).
6. National League of Young Liberals.
7. University Liberal Students.
8. For a discussion of community politics, see chapter by Stuart Mole in Vernon Bogdanor (ed.) Liberal Politics (OUP, 1983), and Tudor Jones, The Uneven Path of British Liberalism (MUP, 2019).
9. Interview with Adrian Slade, 2004, published in Mark Pack blog, 4 June 2012, https://www.markpack.org.uk/32002/tony-greaves-from-angry-young-man-to-simmering-old-guru/
10. David Torrance, David Steel: Rising Hope to Elder Statesman (Biteback, 2012).
11. Jonathan Kirkup, The Lib-Lab Pact: A Parliamentary Agreement, 1977–78 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
12. Adrian Slade interview.
13. See: https://www.beemeadowcroft.uk/liberal/liberalismandpower1.html; and David Steel, Against Goliath: David Steel’s Story (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989).
14. Lancashire Evening Telegraph, 16 Jun. 1987.
15. Tony Greaves, ‘Principles of Self-Government in Pendle’, in Peter Hain (ed.), Community Politics (J Calder, 1976).
16. Tony Greaves, ‘The Alliance: Threat and Opportunity’, New Outlook, Sep. 1981.
17. David Walter, The Strange Rebirth of Liberal England (Politico’s, 2003).
18. The Independent, ‘Tony Greaves, archetypal activist, “Hairy man of grassroots Liberalism”’, 12 Sep. 1987.
19. Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (OUP, 1995). See also, Michael Meadowcroft, Social Democracy: Barrier or Bridge? (Liberator Publications, 1981).
20. Tony Greaves, ‘A Lifetime in Liberalism: Where do we go now?’, 4th Viv Bingham Lecture, Journal of Liberal History 103, Summer 2019.
21. Ibid.
22. Tony Greaves and Gordon Lishman, Democrats or Drones? A party which belongs to its members, Hebden Royd Paper 5 (Hebden Royd Publications, Sep. 1987); see also Michael Meadowcroft, ‘Merger or Renewal? A Report to the Joint Liberal Assembly’, 23/24 Jan. 1988, Leeds.
23. Rachael Pitchford and Tony Greaves, Merger: The inside story (Liberal Renewal, 1989).
24. Michael Meadowcroft, ‘Tony and the Merger’, Liberator 406, April 2021.
25. The others were Peter Knowlson, former head of policy for the Liberal Party, Michael Meadowcroft, former Liberal MP, Leeds West, and Rachael Pitchford, chair of National League of Young Liberals. All four were directly elected members.
26. Adrian Slade interview, Mark Pack blog.
27. Pitchford and Greaves, Merger, appendices 1–4; at a meeting in Leeds on 28 Nov. 2016 Tony Greaves revealed that Shirley Williams had said to him a few days earlier that it had ‘taken her forty years to realise that she was a Liberal’.
28. Duncan Brack (ed.), Why I am a Liberal Democrat (Liberal Democrat Publications, 1996).
29. Tony Greaves, ‘Audacious – but fundamentally flawed’, Journal of Liberal History, Spring 2001.
30. Paddy Ashdown, The Ashdown Diaries: Volume 1, 1988–1997 (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000).
31. Liz Barker, ‘Tony in the Lords’, Liberator 406, Apr. 2021.
32. Daily Mail, 25 Feb. 2013.
33. Lady Angela Harris, Yorkshire and The Humber Region, Newsletter, 27 Mar. 2021.
34. Ibid.
35. Daily Telegraph, 24 Mar. 2021.
36. Paddy Ashdown, The Ashdown Diaries. Volume 2, 1997–1999 (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001), entry for 17 Nov. 1998.
37. Crewe and King, SDP.
38. Quoted in https://www.ramblers.org.uk/news/latest-news/2021/march/lord-greaves.aspxRev.

8 June 2021

John Gunnell was amongst the last of that solid breed of socialist municipal chiefs, imbued with a belief that public authorities exist to improve the lot of their citizens and a conviction that it was not only legitimate but obligatory to use their resources to develop local services. He was par excellence a local government man.

John Gunnell's election to the leadership of the Labour Group on the West Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council in 1979, and his subsequent assumption of the leadership of the County Council in 1981, came at a time when there was still a need to consolidate its reputation and image. The metropolitan county suffered initially in the public mind from comparison with its predecessor the West Riding County Council, and its first leader, Edward Newby, had been convicted for an earlier financial involvement with John Poulson. Newby left abruptly in 1975 to be succeeded by Ken Woolmer who then resigned following his election to parliament in 1979.

The Labour councillors saw in John Gunnell the solidarity that was very much needed and appointed him to the leadership after only two years on the council. It proved a wise choice and Gunnell applied himself to his duties with remarkable dedication, welding the governing Labour Group into an effective team. In those days when there was only a meagre attendance allowance for councillors, Gunnell often had to rush back to Leeds from a full day at County Hall in Wakefield to continue his University of Leeds lectureship in science and mathematics education. It is said that on occasion his tutorials began at midnight.

He was dogged rather than dynamic, and certainly didn't see virtue in brevity. His style was to master his brief and to then to deliver an all encompassing but dour speech. He was a fixer and a coaxer rather than an orator and he would on occasion exasperate even his most loyal supporters. Once, in a county council debate, after twenty minutes or so, a colleague called out, "Sit down John - you're beginning to talk us out of it."

John Gunnell's integrity and commitment to local government were recognised by friend and foe alike and in 1983 the six metropolitan county councils appointed him their spokesman in the three year struggle to prevent Mrs Thatcher's government abolishing them and the Greater London Council. Mrs Thatcher was not to be deflected by argument but I recall John being genuinely baffled that the government preferred to consign key aspects of county government, such as police and fire services, to unaccountable indirectly elected joint boards.

He remained in local government being elected to Leeds City Council in 1986 for the same Hunslet ward. If he was frustrated in having to take a relative back seat in a smaller authority it didn't show and he was a popular and loyal Labour member. In 1992 Merlyn Rees retired as Member of Parliament for John Gunnell's electoral area and he was the obvious choice as Labour candidate for the redrawn constituency of Leeds South and Morley. Given his background he found it difficult to adjust to the cut and thrust of the Commons chamber but he committed himself effectively to the more practical work of standing and select committees.

During his time in parliament he began to suffer from a debilitating illness and he did not stand at the 2001 general election. Those who attended the ceremony in Leeds Civic Hall that year for his election as an Honorary Alderman were distressed to see how ill he was.

John Gunnell was a Yorkshireman by adoption, having been born in Birmingham. He came to Leeds to study for his BSc (Hons) degree in chemistry. As a conscientious objector he chose to do the equivalent of National Service as a porter at St Barts Hospital in London, returning to Leeds thereafter to teach in a city centre school. After an eight year stretch teaching in New York, he returned in 1970 to a post at Leeds University. He was passionate about sport and about music - particularly opera.

John Gunnell recently attended the funeral of his wife, Jean, who had also been ill for some time. He died from a heart attack and leaves three sons and a daughter.

(William) John Gunnell, born 1 October 1933, married Jean Lacey 1955, died 28 January 2008

See also The Guardian.

Guardian obituary

Official portrait of Lord Greaves Photo: Roger Harris, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons Tony Greaves, Lord Greaves, who has died aged 78, was a stalwart of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats for half a century. Elevated to the peerage in 2000 on Charles Kennedy's nomination, he used his position in the Lords to extend his career of community activism and to try to promote a more radical kind of Liberalism in the upper house. While doing so he continued as a member of Pendle borough council in Lancashire, to which he had been elected on its formation in 1973, serving for almost 50 years until his death.

Born in Bradford, Greaves was a Yorkshireman transported to Lancashire by his employment as a teacher of geography and who made his home and his political base in the Pendle district. The son of Geoffrey Greaves, a police driving instructor, and his wife, Moyra (nee Brookes), he went to Queen Elizabeth Grammar school in Wakefield as a scholarship boy and traced his interest in politics to the sixth form there, "where we debated everything". By the time he arrived at Hertford College, Oxford, he had found himself in tune with Jo Grimond's Liberal party, which he joined in 1961, and went canvassing for the first time in the Liberal victory at the Orpington byelection of 1962.

After gaining a degree in geography at Oxford he took a diploma in economic development at Manchester University. From 1969 to 1974 he taught geography at Colne Grammar school in Lancashire, but it became clear that his commitment was to politics rather than teaching. In 1971 he was elected both to Lancashire county council and to Colne borough council, which later became Pendle borough council.

Under his local leadership the Liberal party and later the Lib Dems controlled Pendle, but his success in local government failed to transfer to parliamentary elections, and he finished third on the three occasions he fought in his home constituency - in Nelson & Colne in February and October 1974 and then, after boundary changes, in Pendle in 1983.

Having supported American draft dodgers in the Vietnam war and taken part in the Stop the Seventy Tour campaign against the visit of the apartheid-era South Africa cricket team, Greaves had been elected in 1970 as chair of the national Young Liberal movement. Most of the "red guard" of radical young Liberals had moved out of mainstream politics by that time, but Greaves stayed.

He had not long been in office when the Liberal party leader, Jeremy Thorpe, made the error of trying to force him to withdraw a pro-Palestinian motion from the Young Liberals' annual conference agenda. Greaves said "no" and a stand-off between the party hierarchy and the youth section continued for some time, although it was eventually smoothed over at the party's own annual assembly.

From 1974 onwards he made a living from a series of politically orientated jobs, initially surviving on the then meagre attendance allowances as a councillor plus his wages from a number of temporary jobs. From 1977 to 1985 he was employed by the Association of Liberal Councillors as its organising secretary, and in that role produced a series of practical handbooks that were well used by the burgeoning numbers of Liberal councillors. He followed this by managing the publishing arm of the party until 1990 and then had stints as a constituency agent while also operating as a secondhand book dealer specialising in Liberal history and theory.

For a five-month period from September 1987 he was a member of the Liberal party team negotiating a merger with the Social Democratic party (SDP), an undertaking that proved to be mentally and physically exhausting. He was unable to accept the final package and resigned from the negotiating team, speaking in vain against the merger of the two parties at the special Liberal Party assembly in 1988 in Blackpool. Together with the then chair of the Young Liberals, Rachael Pitchford, he co-wrote a diary of the whole process, published as Merger: The Inside Story in 1989.

Later on, Greaves joined the Liberal Democrats, although in 1996 he declared that "fundamentally I am not a 'Liberal Democrat' for .... I do not know what it means." He continued his efforts to secure "radical Liberal policies", and right up to his death was working on ideas to increase regionalism.

He was well liked by everyone with whom he worked, even though, in the words of one fellow Liberal Democrat peer, "he could be uncompromising, argumentative, curmudgeonly and stubborn." He was also mercurial, taking on causes with gusto and then moving on swiftly as a more urgent issue came up. Sometimes this meant that his considerable intellectual and analytical skills were underplayed.

He got away from politics by relaxing with his family, and, until his older years, spent four weeks each year climbing in the French Pyrenees. He married Heather Baxter in 1968; she was a teacher who shared his political views, had worked briefly in the local government department at Liberal party headquarters, and has been a member of Pendle borough Council for more than 20 years. He is survived by Heather, their two daughters, Vicky and Helen, and a grandson, Robin.

Anthony Robert Greaves, politician, born 27 July 1942; died 23 March 2021.

Yorkshire Post obituary

Official portrait of Lord Greaves Photo: Roger Harris, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons Tony Greaves, who has died suddenly at the age of 78, was a Yorkshireman whose first teaching job took him to Lancashire where he remained, in the borough of Colne. His family lived in Bradford where his father, Geoffrey Greaves, was in the police service as a driving instructor.

Tony gained a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School but the family moved and Tony instead attended Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School in Wakefield. He spoke warmly of his later experience of the school where, in the sixth form, "we debated everything." Through this he gained his interest in politics at a time in the early 1960s when Jo Grimond was an attractive and articulate Liberal leader. By the time Greaves arrived at Hertford College, Oxford, in 1961 to read geography, he had already decided to join the young Liberals.

He taught geography at Colne Grammar School from 1969 to 1974 but it was soon clear that his commitment was going to be to politics rather than to teaching. He was elected to Colne Borough Council and to Lancashire County Council in 1971. He remained a local council member, latterly on the Pendle Borough Council, up to his death. Under his leadership the Liberals and later the Liberal Democrats controlled the council but there was no transfer to parliamentary elections in which he finished third on each of his three contests. After 1974 he made a somewhat precarious living from a succession of politically orientated jobs: organiser of the Association of Liberal Councillors, head of the party's publishing wing and even as a second hand bookseller specialising in Liberal history and theory. Fortunately his schoolteacher wife, Heather, was also a committed Liberal and was herself a long term local councillor.

Greaves' natural radicalism took him to the leadership of the national Young Liberal movement in its "Red Guard" phase and this led him to a number of battles with the party leadership. Youth politics was far more radical and attractive in the late 1960s and the 1970s than today and the 1968 Young Liberal Conference attracted 750 delegates. The Young Liberal influence within the party was most evident when Greaves successfully moved the motion at the 1970 annual party assembly that committed the party to a dual strategy of community politics alongside the parliamentary campaigns.

When David Steel pushed the Liberal party towards a merger with the SDP, Greaves was elected on to the Liberal negotiating team. There followed five months of "physical and mental exhaustion" and he was unable to accept the final package. He spoke in vain against the merger at the subsequent special party assembly but he joined the new party maintaining and arguing from within for "radical Liberal policies" and for a commitment to campaigning at the local level.

He was an unexpected party nominee as a Life Peer and he simply extended his career of promoting activism and key policies to his new sphere of action. Although he dealt conscientiously with parochial matters he had a lifelong concern for national and international issues.

He was intensely loyal to colleagues and adored by those he worked with even though, in the words of a fellow Yorkshire peer, "he could be uncompromising, argumentative, curmudgeonly and stubborn." he took an unexpected pleasure in his family, not least in Robin, the son of Helen and Martin Hamilton, the Director of Leeds Civic Trust. He kept a link with his native Yorkshire by maintaining a season ticket for Bradford Park Avenue football club. Otherwise he relaxed by getting away completely from politics for four weeks annually, until his older years climbing in the French Pyrenees.

In 1968 he married Heather Baxter, who survives him with their two daughters.

Honorary Alderman Douglas Gabb - Dougie to all his colleagues - has died just one month short of his hundredth birthday. To those in Leeds municipal life he was for forty-five years a constant presence on the Labour benches in the Civic Hall council chamber. His other long term political commitment was as Denis Healey's agent in Leeds South East and later Leeds East for the whole of his forty years in the House of Commons. After he had retired from parliament Healey described Gabb as his "best friend."

Gabb finished his schooling at Kepler School (later Roseville Secondary School) at the age of fourteen. His first job was as a page boy at the Leeds Grand Theatre but he left to fulfil his ambition to become a jockey and was employed in the stables at Newmarket. However, his mother made him return to Leeds to take up an engineering apprenticeship with the Blackburn Aircraft company. Then, after employment at the Yorkshire Copper Works and at the Barnbow ordnance factory, he moved to the University of Leeds where he worked for twenty-six years, latterly as the technician in charge at the Houldsworth School of Engineering. On his retirement he was honoured by the University with the honorary degree of Master of Engineering. Earlier, in 1975, he had been awarded the OBE for his services to local government.

First elected to Leeds City Council for the Osmondthorpe ward in 1954 he became an alderman in 1971; when the office of alderman was abolished in the local government reorganisation of 1974 he returned to the council as councillor for the Seacroft ward, which he retained until he retired in 1999. Shortly afterwards he was created an honorary alderman. Gabb's main council responsibility was as chair of the personnel committee and in 1974 he played a key role in the delicate task of enabling the staff of the different local authorities to be formed into a single department following the amalgamation of the Leeds County Borough with the eight neighbouring borough and district councils. He served as Lord Mayor of the city in 1984-85.

Dougie Gabb was a Labour party member for eighty years and was a formidable battler for the Labour cause and, though he was not a particularly effective public speaker, he could always be relied upon to intervene in support of the party's case in city council meetings, usually to refute opposition accusations. For many years he was secretary of the East Leeds Constituency Labour Party which at the time was regarded as one of the most left wing in the country. As secretary he skilfully managed to avoid being in danger of removal by the party bureaucracy by portraying himself as being on the left though, as one colleague commented, "He would support (in general) left-wing resolutions but took no action on them"! Despite his strong political affiliations he never let them harm his personal relationships with opponents. When interviewed in 2011 and asked what his particular interests were, Dougie typically replied, "Staying alive under the Tory/Liberal coalition government"!

His late wife, Ivy Jones, a Holbeck girl, worked at Montague Burton's Hudson Road factory until they married in 1941. For sixteen years she ran a family newsagent's in Headingley. Ivy died in July 1988. They leave three daughters, eleven grandchildren and great-grandchildren.