Sir Teddy Taylor
Authentically working-class Scottish Conservative MP who was close to Mrs Thatcher and raised Brussels-bashing to an art form
SIR TEDDY TAYLOR, the former Eurosceptic Tory MP for Rochford and Southend East who has died aged 80, was a political one-off, a man whose quirky honesty and zest for controversy endeared him to his constituents as much as it irritated the party hierarchy. Taylor exemplified the old Scottish Unionist tradition which, at one time, proved capable of winning a majority of votes and seats north of the border on the basis of significant workingclass support. This tradition and a strong personal following enabled him to hang on to what was basically a working-class constituency in Glasgow-cathcart from 1964 until the 1979 general election, when he became the only Conservative MP (other than by-election victors) to lose his seat. After a few months in limbo he found refuge in warmer political climes in Essex.
A controversial figure always ready with a quote (it was said that he would swim through shark-infested waters to get near a microphone), Taylor was dedicated to withdrawal from the EU and the reintroduction of corporal and capital punishment. The journalist (later Labour MP) Brian Wilson once wrote that calling him a cuddly name like “Teddy” was “like calling the hound of the Baskervilles ‘Rover’”. Yet even his opponents agreed that Taylor was a more charming man than his hardline image might suggest.
He was also idiosyncratic in his views. Although he was pro-hanging, anti-homosexual rights and anti-abortion, he was also one of the few Conservative MPS who fiercely opposed foxhunting. Though a long-time member of the Monday Club, he was also a champion of his Asian constituents and an outspoken opponent of racist attitudes, which he regarded as “foul”. He was a fan of the Reggae star Bob Marley, whose lyrics – “Every little thing gonna be all right …” – he liked to quote in his speeches.
It was said that no cause was truly lost until Taylor backed it. He voted against increases in MPS’ pay and though he was vehemently pro-zionist he spoke up for Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi who, he claimed, was not responsible for Lockerbie or the bullet which killed WPC Fletcher in 1984. Staunchly teetotal (though an ardent smoker), he campaigned for prohibition in the Palace of Westminster and announced plans for a Teetotal Club of Tory MPS, an idea which came to nothing when he could not find any other MP who would qualify.
The issue of Europe, however, was the one that brought out the combative and fanatical side of Taylor’s personality. One interviewer observed that asking him for his views on the EU was “a bit like putting a coin in a coffee vending machine and getting gallons of hot water all over your shoes”. He had the tendency to adopt the fevered tone of a missionary lecturing a circle of baffled natives and he freely confessed to being a bore on the subject.
It was revealing of both men and typical of Taylor that he remained great friends with the former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath, not a man who usually encouraged social intercourse with Eurosceptics. Taylor had served, briefly, as a junior Scottish Office minister in Heath’s administration but had resigned in protest in 1971 when the Prime Minister began his drive to join the Common Market.
Later Taylor recalled how Heath had taken him into the garden at No10 for a chat: “He said: ‘Now, Teddy. You have got to remember you are a very young man and you might be wrong’. And I said, ‘Yes, I have thought about that very carefully, but I know I am right. I cannot vote to go into the Common Market. I think democracy is going to disappear and there will be mass unemployment’. And we still both feel passionately about it. So we talk to each other and nobody gets bored.”
Taylor was also close to Margaret Thatcher, serving as her shadow Secretary of State for Scotland before the 1979 election, when he spearheaded the campaign against devolution and floated the possibility that the Scottish Tories might develop into a Poujadist party of small businessmen. He would probably have become Secretary of State had he not lost his seat; as it was, the position went instead to the patrician George Younger. There were some in the party who felt that the party’s fortunes north of the border might have been very different if Taylor, rather than the party’s Scottish grandees, had been running things.
Though he re-entered Parliament at a 1980 by-election for Southend East following the death of Sir Stephen Mcadden, ministerial office eluded Taylor. Instead he concentrated his energies on fighting his favourite cause, a stance that brought him, inevitably, into conflict with the party business managers during the passage of the Maastricht Bill, which resulted in his being expelled from the parliamentary party in 1994.
The events of 1994 again showed where Taylor’s strengths really lay. He had been the marginal choice to fight Southend East in 1980, but at succeeding elections he had increased the Conservative majority and established a loyal following through his hard work on behalf of his constituents. He himself reckoned his greatest achievement as an MP had been “the solving of a housing problem which had driven a young man to threaten suicide”. Thus it was that when Conservative Central Office contacted the local party to suggest they drop Taylor as their candidate, they were told to “go jump off the pier”.
Edward Macmillan Taylor was born in Glasgow on April 18 1937 into a God-fearing working-class Presbyterian family. He signed the Pledge aged eight. His father, a stockbroker’s clerk, died shortly after the firm went bankrupt, obliging his widow to get a job in a textile factory to support her family. Far from being drawn to socialism, however, the boy clung to Churchill as “our great national hero”. Young Teddy won a place at the local grammar, Glasgow High, and claimed that his political education developed on the tram to school which passed through the grim council estates of the Gorbals. Though he liked the Scottish Labour politicians whom he met (often more than he did his fellow Tories), he became convinced that they were acting against the interests of the working classes.
He went on to Glasgow University where, irritated by Left-wing lecturers, he abandoned history for economics and political science and became part of its debating scene in the late 1950s, when his contemporaries included John Smith and Donald Dewar. In debates he sought to persuade his socialist friends that “abolishing grammar schools and building council houses would undermine opportunities for the working class”. He signed up for the Tories and then stood for the council, first as a Progressive and then as a Unionist councillor in Cathcart.
Taylor worked briefly on the Glasgow Herald and then, for five years, as an industrial relations officer with the Clyde Shipbuilders’ Association, from which he resigned when he entered Parliament as MP for Cathcart in 1964.
Though he was the youngest MP in the Commons at the time, Taylor never lacked the courage of his convictions. He opposed David Steel’s Abortion Bill, voted against Rhodesian sanctions and spoke up for Enoch Powell when he was expelled from the shadow cabinet. Prodigiously energetic, he wrote unsigned articles for both the Right-wing Sunday Mail and the Left-wing Sunday Post and even found time to publish a novel, Hearts of Stone (1968). But he was a lonely figure. His brash style and hang ’em, flog ’em views were anathema to traditional Scottish Tories who, he complained, treated him like “a lesser form of pond life”. The strain began to tell and in 1969 Taylor collapsed in the chamber with a suspected stroke.
The crisis had its benefits. He received a visit in hospital from Ted Heath bearing a bunch of roses. While recovering, he met Sheila Duncan, a medical social worker whom he had known as a child. She became his wife in 1970, bore him three children and gave him a happy home life and a firm anchor in the choppy seas of politics.
In 1970 Heath appointed Taylor Undersecretary of State in the Scottish Office, the position from which he resigned a year later. He was furious when Heath imposed a devolution policy on the Scottish party and, once Heath had been ousted, did more than anyone else to persuade Mrs Thatcher to abandon it, against the advice of most of her shadow cabinet.
In 1977 she appointed him shadow Scottish secretary with a brief to “destroy the Nats”. Taylor agreed to take on the job even though he knew it would cost him his Cathcart seat where the SNP vote was keeping Labour at bay. When, thanks in part to Taylor’s ridicule, the SNP all but collapsed in 1979, the Tories were the main beneficiaries, recovering seven seats. But the folding SNP vote in Cathcart was, as Taylor anticipated, entirely to Labour’s benefit. Despite the disappointment of losing his seat, Taylor remained typically dignified in defeat, praising the Labour victor John Maxton, as a “fine man”. By the time he returned to the House as MP for Southend, Mrs Thatcher seemed to have lost interest in her erstwhile protégé, perhaps recognising instinctively that Taylor was not a man whose personality would adapt well to the compromises of office. In a revealing anecdote Taylor claimed to have been the only person she ever assaulted: “I was sitting next to Airey Neave and I brought up something about the abuses of the EEC, and she stretched out and got my hand and went like that [slap] and said, ‘Teddy, don’t you mention the EEC again!’”
As convinced opposition to European integration had been the constant of Taylor’s career, her advice was wasted. In the 1980s and 1990s he raised Brussels-bashing almost to a political art form. He claimed to have shouted at Mrs Thatcher during the passage of the Single European Act (he felt she had been “duped” by the Foreign Office) and was the first MP to announce that he would not support the Government over Maastricht. During the passage of the bill he voted against the Government 48 times, beating his fellow Eurosceptic Bill Cash’s record by one vote.
Although, like the other Maastricht rebels, Taylor found himself on the receiving end of rough treatment by the party business managers, he never bore them any ill will. Indeed, he argued that they should not be given back the party whip because it would “destroy the basis of discipline in the party if someone is just going to be put out of the room for 10 minutes”. He was unique among Eurosceptics, too, in his personal fondness for John Major, who came from a similar social background.
Yet he was not blind to Major’s faults, recalling how, during the passage of the Maastricht Bill, Major had invited him to No10 for a chat: “I bored him with my views on Europe. And when I had finished he said, ‘Can I tell you something in complete confidence? You mustn’t repeat it. Privately, I think exactly as you do. I just disagree about the tactics’. I was very impressed by this until I discovered that he says exactly the same thing to everyone who comes to see him.”
In 1994 Taylor made a memorable appearance on the BBC panel show Have I Got News For You where he seemed oblivious to the fact it was satire and tried to conduct serious political debate. But the obsessive sides of Taylor’s personality were always alleviated by a streak of self-mockery. He once told a journalist that the worst development in his political career had been the introduction of multi-coloured raffle tickets, which meant that he could no longer get away with producing the same old ticket at party fundraising events.
In 1991 Taylor accepted a knighthood in the Queen’s birthday honours “chiefly because it would please my mother”. He stood down at the 2005 general election after 41 years as an MP. In 2008 he published a memoir, Teddy Boy Blue.
He is survived by his wife Sheila and by their daughter and two sons.
Sir Teddy Taylor, born April 18 1937, died September 20 2017