He Will Be Sorely Missed

Although I am not sure why anyone would bother to retire having worked to quite such an age (perhaps, one day, I shall be), Peter Oborne writes:

When Sir Peter Tapsell became an MP in 1959, significant parts of the globe were still coloured red, the Beatles had not yet produced their first LP, the contraceptive pill was unknown, and the Lady Chatterley trial had not taken place.

General Eisenhower was US president, the Daily Express was Britain’s best-selling newspaper, David Cameron was not even a gleam in his father’s eye, City workers still wore bowler hats and the threepenny bit was still in circulation.

A great deal has changed since then, but not Sir Peter.

Now 84, he is father of the House of Commons and, even as it yesterday emerged he will stand down as an MP at the next general election, still firing on all cylinders.

I arrive at 11am sharp at his Chambers in Albany, off Piccadilly, the famous apartment block whose occupants have included Gladstone, Macaulay, Dame Edith Evans and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Sir Peter also has homes in his Lincolnshire constituency (''a perfect example of early 18th-century domestic architecture"), in Paris, Gstaad, Morocco and Barbados. He opens a bottle. ''We don't do coffee. Have a glass of champagne.’"

After national service and Oxford, where he read modern history, Sir Peter went to work for Sir Anthony Eden as a speech writer.

''I was only 25 and I had a tremendous admiration for him as he had been the man who had first stood up against the dictators and opposed appeasement.

''He interviewed me alone in the cabinet room and had only just become prime minister, literally three or four weeks before.

"He said: 'I’ve just read your CV and see you’ve got a first in history.' And I said, 'Yes prime minister, not as good as you, you’ve got a double first in Persian and Arabic.'

"I think he was impressed that at 25 I knew his background so well and that’s why I was appointed, I presume."

Sir Peter spent the 1955 election campaign driving around Britain with Sir Anthony and his wife Clarissa, ''still alive and very well and hearty at 93"’, writing speeches.

''I would go into his bedroom about 7am, and he'd be in bed with Clarissa. She would be in curlers – in those days women wore curlers – she would take one look at me with her head under the bedclothes and say, 'Oh my God, it's that boy again.'"

A promising political career beckoned, but Sir Peter was only paid £12 by the Conservative Research Department and had no money.

''My father was then in his seventies and worked on a coffee estate for someone in East Africa, and I knew I would have to support both of my parents.’"

So he went to work for a stockbroker as a half commission agent. He was given a list of institutions and told that the brokers had earned £3,670 from them in commission the previous year.

In his first year, Sir Peter put the commission up for his list from £3,670 to £100,000. He was promoted to partner. ''I was, I believe, the youngest partner on the London stock exchange."

Sir Peter insists he knew nothing about figures, but he had a flair for business.

In 1963, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, he forced his way into the office of a city grandee called George Pulley.

''I said, 'Now is the time to buy British gilts.' He said, 'But everyone is selling gilts.' I said, 'Yes, but if the Russian fleet goes on sailing it doesn't matter what you do. Your office won't exist, you and I won't exist. But if it turns back, your gilts will instantly recover.'

"He said: 'Yes, you're quite right. Go and buy me 5 million long gilts now.'

''Half an hour later it was announced that the Russian fleet had turned back and the gilt market jumped five or six points.

"Pulley made hundreds of thousands of pounds in profit and we made quite a lot of commission. But more to the point, George Pulley told all the other top bankers about me."

Sir Peter Tapsell was launched.

''I was beginning to make a good deal of money. By the time I was in my middle forties, I was earning £500,000 a year."

During one of the sterling crises of the 1960s, Jim Callaghan, then Labour chancellor, rang up Sir Peter. ''He said, 'I know you are very close to the Sultan of Brunei. Do you think you could persuade him to buy some sterling?'"

So Sir Peter flew at once to Brunei, where he told the Sultan that he would definitely lose money on the deal.

''To cut a long story short, he ordered me to buy £500 million worth of gilts for the Brunei fund.

"I flew straight back to England and dealt with the Bank of England direct for secrecy reasons and then we leaked it to the press – not the Sultan's name, of course.

"The headline in the Financial Times was: 'Heavy Buying of Sterling.'"

The day was saved.

Meanwhile, Sir Peter’s political career was treading water.

''I didn’t really think, at any point, that I wanted to be parliamentary secretary for drains, and liable to be dismissed at any moment by some prime minister who didn't care for me or who thought I was too bumptious, or something like that."

Eventually, however, Mrs Thatcher persuaded Sir Peter to join her Treasury team in opposition.

He explained to her that he was a Keynesian who disagreed with her monetary views. Mrs Thatcher told him it didn't matter.

And so ''very much to my regret, the single biggest mistake I made in politics in my life, I agreed."

He recalls how miserable he felt at private meetings with Thatcherites like Sir Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, Nick Ridley and Nigel Lawson, where he argued that monetarism would have terrible consequences.

''My father was unemployed in the 1930s. He couldn’t go to work and I can remember standing in a queue with him, when he was unemployed, and my mother crying in the kitchen because we didn't have money for the rent and all that."

It was not long before he quietly resigned.

Two years later, in the famous Budget of 1981, Sir Peter Tapsell became the first Conservative since Harold Macmillan in the 1930s to vote against a Budget, a brave move which turned him into an internal political exile.

I put it to Sir Peter that monetarism had worked and that Mrs Thatcher's tough medicine had saved the economy. He refuses to accept this.

''It destroyed British industry. The whole of the West Midlands was wiped out and has never recovered."

Suddenly Sir Peter looks at his watch. It is time for lunch.

We walk out of the Albany, across Piccadilly towards Wiltons restaurant in Jermyn Street, where he recalls an address to new members given by Macmillan in 1959.

''He said that Parliament has about one thousand rooms in it and only two of them were ever worth entering; the chamber and the smoking room.

"And it was true for the first 30 years of my time here; the chamber was always full, wind-up debates were always packed, the top journalists were still in the press gallery at 10pm.

"Now the press gallery is empty after four. As for the smoking room, we are trying to turn it into an ice cream parlour or something like that."

What is Sir Peter, married to his second wife, Gabrielle Mahieu, for 40 years, most proud of?

''My opposition to the Maastricht Treaty. Because everything that has gone wrong in Britain dates from us joining the European Union.

"One of the reasons the House of Commons has lost its prestige is because people feel we are no longer in charge of a country.

"So much of the legislation that affects them is imposed by Brussels."

He is in favour of leaving the European Union.

''If we had a referendum and the country votes to stay in then we're finished as a country because we will just be gobbled up into the German Empire."

Lunch over and Sir Peter is getting anxious.

He needs to get to Parliament for the foreign affairs debate, where he intends to oppose intervention in Crimea.

''There is nothing more shameful than for statesmen in their safe offices to encourage idealistic young men to go out and be shot down in the streets by tyrants."

As I watch him nimbly cross St James's Street and hail a cab, I reflect how much British democracy needs people like him and that he will be sorely missed.