Sir Edward du Cann
Senior Tory MP whose dubious business activities earned him the nickname ‘du Cann of Worms’
SIR EDWARD DU CANN, who has died aged 93, was the former Conservative MP for Taunton and chairman of Lonrho, the controversial company run by Tiny Rowland. For 25 years du Cann held positions of power and eminence in Westminster and in the City of London. But the admiration he commanded in both spheres in his early career later turned to distrust: after his political influence had waned, his business life dissolved into a morass of dubious ventures and unpaid debts. Private Eye gave him the nickname “du Cann of Worms”.
Du Cann was first and last a man of business rather than political ideas – “a money man”, as Cecil King recorded in his diary – who came to prominence as a young MP on the strength of his reputation as a pioneer of the unit trust movement. But at his zenith in 1974 he was considered a credible candidate to succeed Edward Heath as leader of the Conservatives, and in the late 1970s he was tipped as a possible Chancellor. Unsurpassed in Westminster intrigue, oleaginous charm and the arts of survival, he held the chairmanship of the Conservative back-bench 1922 Committee for a record 12 years.
His experience of government was brief. In the 1962 reshuffle known as the “Night of the Long Knives”, Harold Macmillan picked him to be Economic Secretary to the Treasury. Having played a shadowy role in undermining Macmillan, du Cann secured another job the following year, under Sir Alec Douglas-home, as Edward Heath’s junior at the Board of Trade.
Home, who had adopted du Cann as a protégé, made him a Privy Councillor in the dissolution honours list after the 1964 election, and a month later appointed him chairman of the Party. Still only 40, sleek, silver-tongued and apparently rich, du Cann seemed assured of a glittering future.
As chairman of the party, du Cann presided graciously over the departure of Home and the installation of Edward Heath as leader. He also brought beneficial changes to the running of the Central Office machine; the loss of the 1966 election made no more than a minor dent to his reputation.
But it was well known that the new leader disliked du Cann and wanted rid of him. Heath lacked sufficient grip on the party to be able to sack him immediately, and it was not until the following year that he was consigned (despite, according to his own account, a promise of future ministerial office) to the backbenches. He was to stay there for the rest of his political career.
Antipathy between Heath and du Cann dated from their period as trade ministers together: their personalities were incompatible, they disagreed over the abolition of price controls, and one of du Cann’s few identifiable political traits was lack of enthusiasm for the European cause to which Heath was so devoted.
When Heath became prime minister, he made a series of verbal swipes at City entrepreneurs, among whom du Cann was implicitly included. Du Cann’s revenge came in his election as chairman of the powerful 1922 Committee in 1972, widely seen as a warning to Heath from his back-bench critics.
Du Cann was not above delivering glutinous encomia to Heath at party gatherings (“If you attack, you need never look behind … ”). Inscrutable pragmatism led him at first to favour a continuation of Heath’s leadership after the two electoral disasters of 1974. But as the tide of opinion in Conservative ranks ran strongly against Heath, du Cann became a central player in the plot to unseat him.
Although disliked by some Tory grandees, du Cann himself emerged in the early running as a favoured candidate among backbenchers. Shortly after the October election, the bookmakers Ladbrokes put his chances at 8-1, behind William Whitelaw and Keith Joseph but well ahead of the 50-1 outsider, Margaret Thatcher. Du Cann’s campaign was initially organised by Airey Neave.
But his seriousness as a candidate was hampered by the fact that no one really knew what policies he stood for, other than dislike of Socialism. And Nemesis was at his shoulder in the form of the accident-prone business career which he had continued to pursue in parallel with politics: the merchant bank of which he was chairman, Keyser Ullman, was in serious difficulties. As the Thatcher challenge gathered momentum, du Cann, Neave and others threw their weight behind her – the machinations which took place in du Cann’s City offices earning them the sobriquet of the “Milk Street Mafia”.
No chairman of the ’22 was ever more assiduous in his relations with fellow backbenchers. Many times reelected unopposed, he was admired as an effective shop steward, a relentless persuader by all means at his disposal – cordial, devious or quietly brutal – and an acute reader of shifting currents.
As such, du Cann made himself valuable to Mrs Thatcher during the opposition years. He had also consolidated his power base by becoming chairman of the influential Public Accounts Committee – an odd position for a man who was criticised (with fellow directors) as “incompetent” by a Department of Trade inquiry into Keyser Ullman’s affairs, and who had narrowly avoided personal bankruptcy.
Margaret Thatcher seemed initially unconscious of du Cann’s dangerous reputation in the City, and is even said on one occasion to have replied “Edward, of course” when asked whom she foresaw as her Chancellor. But others in the Tory establishment had come to regard him as too smooth by half and unsuitable for office, especially at the Treasury: Whitelaw was thought to have delivered the definitive blackball.
Du Cann was undoubtedly disappointed not to be offered a job in government after the 1979 election, but was wont to claim that his business commitments would have prevented him from accepting; just as he let it be known that it was his wife who had prevailed on him not to let his name go forward in the 1975 leadership contest.
He was never recognisably a Thatcherite. After the 1979 election, he chaired the Select Committee on the Treasury and the Civil Service which, in its capacity as invigilator of economic policy, issued a series of critiques of monetarism under his signature. The devout expressions of loyalty to his leader issued simultaneously under his 1922 hat sounded increasingly hollow, and his role as silken courtier diminished.
As his powers of political manipulation waned accordingly, distrust of him grew. In November 1984 he lost the 1922 chairmanship to Cranley Onslow by a margin of 23 votes. He received a knighthood shortly afterwards in recompense.
Also in 1984, du Cann had succeeded Lord Duncan-sandys as chairman of Lonrho, of which he had been a director since 1972. It was the company whose activities had once been damned by Edward Heath as “an unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism”, and it was never far from controversy. His position there, coupled with a series of revelations about unpaid personal debts, gradually eroded du Cann’s Establishment standing.
His seamless aplomb gave no hint of declining fortune or prestige. But when he stood down as an MP at the 1987 election, he was the first exchairman of the 1922 Committee to be denied a peerage. Much greater humiliation was to follow over the next five years.
Edward Dillon Lott du Cann was born on May 28 1924. The grand manners he acquired in political life belied modest middle-class origins. He was the elder son of a writer and barrister, CDL Du Cann (Edward adopted the lower case “d” at the time of his first parliamentary candidacy), and a mother who had once sold children’s clothes at Harrods.
Young Edward was educated at Woodbridge Grammar School in Suffolk and at St John’s College, Oxford, where he read Law. He served with the RNVR from 1943 to 1946 and read for the Bar before commencing parallel careers in the City and in Conservative politics. He first stood for Parliament in the 1951 general election against the then prime minister, Clement Attlee, at West Walthamstow. Attlee predicted a “shining future” for his 27-year-old opponent. Du Cann tried again at Barrow-in-furness in 1955, and finally succeeded in the safe seat of Taunton in a by-election in 1956, during which the local press commented on his “bounding confidence”.
It was not until the following year that his business career also took wing. Until then he had been working in the City for a small, and relatively obscure, unit trust company formed before the Second World War. Restrictions on the creation of new unit trusts had been lifted in 1953, but little activity had resulted. Du Cann saw the potential for expansion, and put the idea to Peter (later Lord) Walker, then a Lloyd’s insurance broker.
The two men combined to launch Unicorn Securities, backed by the London & Edinburgh Insurance Co. With du Cann as managing director, the company attracted £19 million of assets and 160,000 investors by 1961. Du Cann stepped aside briefly when he became a minister, but returned to the business after the Conservative defeat in 1964.
In 1965 Martins Bank bought out London & Edinburgh, and in 1968 Barclays bought Martins. Du Cann continued as head of Barclays Unicorn until 1972 and joined the clearing bank’s board; he was mentioned in some quarters as a potential chairman. Through the Martins connection he also became a director, and then chairman, of Keyser Ullman (KU), a modest but respectable merchant bank of 19th-century origins.
KU expanded dramatically in the early 1970s under du Cann’s leadership, absorbing Central & District Properties, of which he was also chairman, and lending heavily to property developers such as William Stern (later bankrupted for £104 million) and Christopher Selmes.
It was KU’S £17 million financing of Selmes’s takeover of Grendon Trust which brought the bank into difficulties when the property market collapsed in 1974, and which later attracted the accusation of incompetence from government inspectors.
The Bank of England came to the rescue, and du Cann stepped down as chairman in 1975. But he had personal loans outstanding from KU amounting eventually to more than £500,000. These loans had financed du Cann’s 15 per cent stake in Cannon Assurance, a life insurance business controlled by KU and originally associated with the swindlers Bernie Cornfeld and Robert Vesco. But for the protection afforded by his political prominence, du Cann might well have been forced into bankruptcy.
When Cannon was sold in 1979, du Cann’s stake yielded £1.4 million, enabling him to repay the bank debt. But he failed to pay the substantial capital gains tax due on his profits until six years later, when the Inland Revenue threatened him with criminal proceedings.
KU had become advisers to Lonrho in 1972, and du Cann had joined the Lonrho board, where he became a close ally of RW “Tiny” Rowland, the group’s dictatorial managing director. As chairman from 1984, du Cann’s chief functions were to perform as an eloquent frontman for the saturnine Rowland at annual general meetings, and as an occasional ambassador in Lonrho’s dealings with African heads of state.
He took a more active role in the battle over the Al-fayeds’ acquisition of Harrods, the most bitter of Rowland’s many business vendettas. Du Cann’s acquiescence in the publication (in the Lonrho-owned Observer newspaper) of a secret Department of Trade & Industry report highly critical of the Al-fayeds’ bid, was seen by some observers as a breach of his Privy Council oath. His public attacks on trade ministers for failing to act on the DTI report are thought to have wiped out any residual possibility of a peerage. And his personal problems with money were coming increasingly to the fore.
Du Cann’s salary as chairman of Lonrho was more than £400,000 per annum, but he was pathologically unable to keep his finances in order. Since the early 1960s he had enjoyed a conspicuously opulent way of life, accumulating at his peak a house in Lord North Street, a grand medieval manor and estate in Somerset, a Rolls-royce and a luxurious yacht. He had often complained of the difficulty of making ends meet on such a scale, and he borrowed heavily against all his assets.
But the nub of the problem was the character of the man himself. He appeared to believe that, as in other spheres, charm and ambiguity would see him through; perhaps he also supposed that influence placed him outside the norms of financial rectitude.
A habitual bad payer and bouncer of cheques, he was repeatedly sued by tradesmen and professionals who had undertaken work for him; one local builder was said to have a writ delivered with every invoice. It was testimony to Tiny Rowland’s sometimes ill-judged loyalty to close associates – and contempt for conventional proprieties – that du Cann continued as chairman of Lonrho, a major public company, long after his personal unreliability had been exhaustively exposed.
Du Cann finally stepped down from the Lonrho chair in August 1991, when the aftermath of his involvement in yet another controversial business, Homes Assured, conclusively terminated his business career. Homes Assured was a mortgage-broking company which used hard-sell methods to persuade council tenants to buy their homes. Against advice from friends, du Cann joined the board in 1988.
He resigned a year later, a few days before the company collapsed owing £10 million to 1,500 creditors. The DTI began proceedings against du Cann and fellow executives to have them disqualified from holding any directorships.
Finally, in March 1993, banks, lawyers and the Inland Revenue petitioned for du Cann’s bankruptcy. The land around his Somerset home, Cothay Manor, had already been repossessed. His Westminster flat, which proved to have five separate mortgages outstanding against it, went the same way; but his second wife’s private fortune allowed the couple to continue to live in comfort.
His autobiography, Two Lives: The Political and Business Career of Edward du Cann, was published in 1995. In his later years he lived in Cyprus.
Edward du Cann married first, in 1962, Mrs Sallie Innes (née Murchie), a distant cousin on his mother’s side. They had a son and two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1990, and in the same year he married Lady (Jennifer) Cooke, widow of another Conservative MP, Sir Robert Cooke. She died in 1995.