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Sir Philip Goodhart

Conservative politician who defied ideological labels, infuriated party whips and fell out with prime ministers
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Goodhart with his wife Valerie campaigning in the Beckenham by-election in 1957
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Although Sir Philip Goodhart, the Tory MP for Beckenham from 1957 until 1992, spent only a short period as a junior minister, he had more impact on public life than many cabinet ministers.

He was known for his opposition to Britain’s entry to the European Economic Community without it being backed in a referendum and made an enemy of his party leader, Ted Heath. His pamphlet, Referendum, was written in 1971, four years before a referendum was called by Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister, and he also called for referenda on the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Maastricht Treaty.

Goodhart was ahead of his time in many respects. Apart from the referendum, he campaigned for red routes and speed cameras, called for a sex offenders’ register in 1957 and introduced a private member’s bill to abolish the £50 maximum wage for professional footballers.

He defied ideological labels. He was regarded as a right-wing member of the “One Nation” group of Tories, which is generally on the left of the party. The unpredictability of his views did not endear him to the government’s whips. He regularly voted for the restoration of the death penalty and favoured the repatriation of immigrants.

At the same time he opposed any charges for health and eye tests, cuts in housing benefits, and was eccentric enough to urge the partition of the Falklands if such was agreed in the Argentine referendum of 1984, alienating both his party leader, Margaret Thatcher, and the Falklands people.

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The scion of an American banking family who was born in Britain, Goodhart also had strong views on Vietnam, believing that the US could win the war in southeast Asia as late as 1972. He formed the Anglo-Vietnamese Friendship Society and, after the communist victory in 1975, called for countries throughout Asia to take in the “boat people” who were fleeing Vietnam.

As an MP, who was a leading member of the 1922 committee of Conservative backbenchers, he gradually tired of his leaders. By 1974 he was convinced that Heath should face a leadership challenge and he supported Mrs Thatcher as his replacement in the leadership battle of 1975. “The election of Margaret Thatcher was not inevitable,” he said. “The departure of Ted Heath was.”

He grew apart from Thatcher over the poll tax, which replaced the household rating system, and boasted he had voted more frequently against the community charge, or poll tax, than any other Tory MP. He supported Michael Heseltine against her in the leadership election in 1990. He later recalled: “Margaret lost the key party ballot by two votes. One was mine.”

Philip Carter Goodhart was born in 1925 in London. He attended the Dragon School in Oxford but was sent to the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut before the outbreak of war. At Hotchkiss he was a national champion in 1943 in Time magazine’s competition on current affairs for American schoolchildren. In the same year he returned to Britain to join the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and, after the war, he served in Palestine with 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment.

Goodhart came from what was virtually American aristocracy. His father, Sir Arthur Goodhart, a lawyer, was appointed professor of jurispudence at Oxford in 1931 and then elected Master of University College, Oxford. Philip’s grandmother was the sister of Herbert Lehman, the Democrat governor of New York; the family had established the Lehman Brothers merchant bank in 1856 in Alabama and his father was an heir to the Lehman banking fortune.

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After military service, Goodhart followed his father to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history. As an undergraduate he fought the safe Labour seat of Consett for the Conservatives in the 1950 general election. At Trinity he spent much time on politics and student journalism. His editorship of the magazine Varsity helped him to get a post on the staff of The Daily Telegraph and later The Sunday Times.

The intrepid journalist hitchhiked a lift to Port Said to report on the Suez conflict in 1956 and, a year later, he applied for the Conservative candidacy in the safe seat of Beckenham, where there was a by-election. Although his reports on Suez were never published, the episode impressed sufficient members of the selection committee to win him the nomination. Another candidate, the young Margaret Thatcher who was the mother of young twins, failed to persuade the women on the committee that she could combine being an active MP with motherhood. Some local Conservatives, angry over America’s failure to back Britain at Suez, condemned Goodhart on the ground that he held American citizenship.

He went on to chair Conservative backbench committees on Northern Ireland and defence, but he was too independent-minded and intellectual to be a successful minister. His ministerial career between 1979 and 1981 was brief — less than two years as under-secretary of state at Northern Ireland and just nine months in the same position at the Department of Defence. He continued his interest in Ulster and opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 on the ground that it conceded too much to terrorism.

He left the defence post shortly before the Falklands conflict and was consoled with a knighthood. He wondered if he might have unwittingly provoked the war; he had lobbied so successfully to protect the budget of the armed forces that the navy bore the burden of the cuts and, he thought, may have tempted General Galtieri to launch his assault.

For all his undoubted intelligence he was often inarticulate to the point of incomprehension at the dispatch box. He did not stutter as much as tiresomely pepper his sentences with “urghs and umms”. A Times sketch writer observed, “He is as clear a thinker and as fumbling an orator as they come.”

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Goodhart’s pen was mightier than his tongue. In all, he wrote nine pamphlets and a number of books, including one on the history of the 1922 committee. Another, Fifty Ships That Saved the World: the Foundation of Anglo-American Alliance, told the story of the transfer of 50 old destroyers to the Royal Navy in 1940. He maintained his interest in naval matters and was involved in a campaign to save the ships and submarines involved in the Falklands conflict.

In 1950, he married Valerie Winant, the niece of the wartime US ambassador to London. They had three sons and four daughters: Arthur is a literary agent; Sarah is a bereavement counsellor; David is a writer and the founder of Prospect magazine; Rachel is a teacher; Harriet was an opera singer; Beccy is an editor; and Dan a cameraman. His children and 21 grandchildren survive him.

He died in the same room in the Chelsea and Westminster hospital as his wife Valerie had a year earlier.

As a committed Anglo-American, Goodhart was a strong supporter of Nato and a member of the North Atlantic Assembly. He was chairman of a trust to preserve Sulgrave Manor, the ancestral Oxfordshire home of George Washington, and two of his daughters married Americans.

Sociable and popular, he played tennis and was a good skier. He was chairman of the Lords and Commons Ski Club, breaking his leg in an Anglo-Swiss competition in 1986. Indeed, he was blessed with a great zest for life.

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Sir Philip Goodhart, politician, was born on November 3, 1925. He died on July 5, 2015, aged 89

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