Lord Thomas of Swynnerton
Historian of the Hispanic world and Thatcherite convert who fell out with the Tories over Europe
LORD THOMAS OF SWYNNERTON, who has died aged 85, was an acclaimed historian of the Hispanic world and one of the salon success stories of Margaret Thatcher’s years in office when he served as chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS); yet the unyielding principles that had commended him to her eventually led to a parting of the ways as the Conservative Party embarked on a period of internecine strife over Europe.
Hugh Thomas started life in the political rather than historical sphere. President of the Cambridge Union in 1953, he went on to work at the Foreign Office, and was briefly a prospective Labour candidate. In the mid-1970s, however, he joined the Thatcherite camp, where his sharp mind and iconoclastic wit made him a favourite.
In 1979 he was rewarded with the chairmanship of the CPS, the thinktank set up by Sir Keith Joseph and Alfred (later Sir Alfred) Sherman in order to “think the unthinkable”. In the early 1980s he was a regular visitor to Downing Street, and was said to have played an important role – as a Hispanist – in providing support and advice during the Falklands crisis.
As author of several blockbusting history books, Thomas had a remarkable ability to marshal huge quantities of evidence without obscuring the narrative line. He had a fondness for tackling topics that usually appeal to radical writers – the Spanish Civil War, the history of Cuba and the Atlantic Slave Trade – and he had an eye for the epic struggle: the Spanish Republic against Franco; the Mexicans against the Spaniards; the Cubans against Spain and the Americans. His history sprang from a deep, if unfashionable, belief that knowing about the past helps people to avoid mistakes in the future.
Yet a study of his writings might also have suggested that in Thomas the Tories had something of a cuckoo in the nest, for his writings were suffused with an outward-looking internationalism. He was that rare creature – a Thatcherite Europhile – Thatcherite in his libertarianism and distrust of the state, but out of step with the growing Euroscepticism within the Tory Party under her leadership. It was partly the Labour Party’s opposition to the EEC in the 1970s that had led him to change sides.
His pro-european outlook led to a series of rows within the CPS, and in 1991 he resigned from his post to be replaced by the departed head of Mrs Thatcher’s policy unit at No 10, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach.
Hugh Thomas was born on October 21 1931 at Windsor. His father was a member of the colonial service and the family spent much time in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Hugh was educated at Sherborne, then as a history scholar at Queens’ College Cambridge.
After graduating, he joined the Foreign Office and was sent off to a junior post in Paris. There he became friendly with Paul Johnson, who was there as a journalist. As they lunched in Left-bank cafés the two young men, almost simultaneously, though for slightly different reasons, became fervent supporters of the Labour Party. What particularly appealed to Thomas was Labour’s then internationalist idealism. Not long afterwards, following the Suez fiasco, he left the Foreign Office to become a lecturer at Sandhurst and Labour parliamentary candidate for Ruislip and Northwood.
In 1957 he took the decision to become a full-time writer, not an easy thing to do as he had no private income. One of his first commissions, given to him by the maverick publisher Anthony Blond, was to edit a volume entitled Establishment, a collection of anti-establishment essays by prominent writers.
In his memoir Jew Made in England (2004), Blond recalled that at the time Thomas was living for free at the Old Cavendish Hotel “where his main function was to open the door for the cat. He went to the cinema in Shaftesbury Avenue, courtesy of the usherettes, and was often sick in the loo. On the other hand he was regularly dined by Harold Nicolson at the Beefsteak Club.”
Even in those days Thomas engendered animosity, Blond observed, “merely by entering a room or by his silence. There must have been something chemical about his insolence – the opposite of dumb – yet the certainty of his assumptions and his displays of superior intelligence threw people instantly.”
Blond himself liked Thomas, finding him “loyal, funny, open and even humble about his ambition”, and recorded that it was Thomas who first suggested that he should commission a novel from Simon Raven.
Things began to look up for Thomas in 1959 when a chance conversation with an American publisher led to his being commissioned to write a full-length account of the Spanish Civil War. It was a turning point. Not only did the book, published in 1961, become a bestseller, winning the 1962 Somerset Maugham Award, but he was helped in compiling its index by Vanessa Jebb, daughter of the erstwhile ambassador at the Paris embassy, Gladwyn Jebb (later the Liberal peer Lord Gladwyn). They married in 1962.
In 1966 Thomas was invited to become a professor of history at Reading University, a post which enabled him to complete his monumental Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom, published in 1971. In this he examined Castroism as a product of deep-seated trends in Cuban history rather than, as often portrayed, a product of the clash of Soviet and American interests and ideologies.
A number of smaller books, ranging from a biography of the Labour politician John Strachey to a study of Goya’s revolutionary painting 3 May
brought him to a new crisis in 1974, when he found that he could no longer support the Labour Party due to its anti-europeanism (though he did not formally announce his conversion to Conservatism until 1977).
At about the same time he embarked on a new magnum opus, a highly ambitious Unfinished History of the World, eventually published in 1979. This was no conventional history. The first 160 pages dealt with man’s emergence from primitive beginnings as a hunter-gatherer; the main body of the book described how human life had been transformed by technological and economic development, dealing, in Thomas’s words, with such “neglected topics as the history of brandy, the thermometer and the radish”. In the last section he addressed the question of why material advance had failed to usher in an age of Utopian peace and prosperity, and expressed his fears of a totalitarian future.
Given the anti-statist theme of the book, Thomas was presented with something of a dilemma when it won a £7,500 literary award from the Arts Council the following year. He made the headlines by turning up at the award ceremony, thanking the judges for choosing him, but handing back the cheque, saying that he could not possibly accept it as to do so would have been in conflict with his criticism of the role of the state in society.
During his time at the CPS, Thomas kept up his historical output, publishing Armed Truce: the beginnings of the Cold War 1945-46,
and a book on the Suez Crisis, both in 1986. In the early 1980s he was prominent among a group of academics fighting plans to build a new British Library at Euston.
At the CPS, meanwhile, there were repeated strains between Thomas and some of centre’s staff and board over its purposes and political direction. In the early 1980s he clashed repeatedly with its director, the combative Sir Alfred Sherman, over the relationship between the CPS and the Government.
Thomas believed the centre’s resources should be put at the Government’s disposal while Sherman felt it should preserve its independence. The row came to a head in 1983 when Thomas took steps to curb Sir Alfred’s frequent outspoken attacks on government ministers. His move prompted a masterpiece of invective from Sherman, who wrote to Mrs Thatcher’s chief-of-staff, David Wolfson: “Until the past four months I found Hugh impulsive, weak, prone to panic and vacillate, arbitrary, capricious, and unwilling to devote the time to me and the Centre which the office [of chairman] enjoined. But he was not a bad person. Now he has become devious, mendacious, dishonourable and vicious.”
This showdown ended in victory for Thomas. In October 1983 he wrote to Sherman outlining the CPS’S “New Terms of Reference”. Clause One said: “The CPS is a Centre of Research. It is at the disposal of the Prime Minister and other Ministers. It will do what is asked of it by those Ministers.” Sherman was subsequently ousted.
An even more tricky situation arose under Sherman’s successor David (now Lord) Willetts, a member of an increasingly influential younger generation of Conservative Eurosceptics whose years at the CPS coincided with rising tensions within the party over Europe.
These culminated in 1989 when the CPS published a pamphlet by Oliver Letwin warning of the dangers of a drift towards European federalism. Thomas tried to prevent its publication but was overruled by the centre’s board, though he did succeed in getting their agreement to publish a counterblast by Michael Heseltine.
Then, when this newspaper’s former proprietor Conrad Black delivered a still more excoriating critique of Europe in a speech at a CPS function at the Conservative Party Conference, Thomas was accused of blocking its publication and there was talk of finding a replacement.
Thomas had, in fact, offered to resign on several occasions, but had been deterred by Mrs Thatcher. By the time he did eventually resign in 1991, she herself had been ousted as leader of the Conservative Party. After his resignation he published Ever Closer Union: Britain’s destiny in Europe, a
primer on Britain’s relations with the EU written from an unashamedly pro-european standpoint.
Thomas’s uncompromising independence endeared him no more to the history establishment than it had to many members of the political establishment and despite the high praise heaped on his books – particularly in America – he was never offered a chair at one of Britain’s older universities. Nor was he invited to run any of the many institutes dedicated to Latin America. He described himself as “a historian in private practice”.
After his resignation from the CPS, he added to a highly impressive corpus of work with Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico (1994), about the Spanish conquest of Mexico;
World History, The Story of Mankind from Prehistory to the Present (1996);
The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 (1997);
Rivers of Gold (2003) about the rise of the Spanish empire; Beaumarchais of Seville (2007), an entertaining vignette about the visit to Spain in 1764 of Pierre Augustin Caron, later to be known as de Beaumarchais; Eduardo Barreiros and the Recovery of Spain (2009); The Golden Age: the Spanish Empire of Charles V (2010) and World without End: the Spanish Empire of King Philip II (2013). He also wrote several historical novels.
Thomas was created a life peer in 1981 and eventually found his niche in the House of Lords on the crossbenches.
He is survived by Lady Thomas, and by two sons and a daughter.