Lord Richard
Former ambassador to the UN and EC Commissioner sacked as Leader of the Lords by Tony Blair
LORD RICHARD, who has died aged 85, combined a career at the Bar with service as a Labour MP and junior minister, ambassador to the UN, a European Commissioner and ultimately Tony Blair’s Leader of the Lords. His political career – he took 38 years to reach the Cabinet – had few high spots, but Labour leaders from Harold Wilson to Blair valued his services. A Welsh scholarship boy, a Right-of-centre internationalist and a bon vivant, Richard owed his political longevity to holding important but secondtier offices rather than any meekness of spirit.
During his time at the UN he attacked his abrasive American counterpart, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, so forcibly as to chill relations with Washington, secured an apology from a Rhodesian guerrilla who accused Britain of treating all Africans as “n-----s”, gave the architect of UDI Ian Smith the rough edge of his tongue, and reprimanded President Carter’s motormouthed UN ambassador Andrew Young.
Richard possessed both an implacable hatred of racism and a willingness to “think the unthinkable” – notably over Rhodesia, where his apparently wild thoughts on a settlement were close to those eventually negotiated by Lord Carrington.
He was, however, sensitive about his girth. He refused to let his second wife hang his outsize underpants outside to dry, and took it as an appalling insult when a Saudi diplomat, during a tense session on the Middle East, told him to “go back to your spaghetti”. In his final months at the UN he shed six stone.
Ivor Seward Richard was born on May 30 1932 at Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, the son of a mining engineer. He won scholarships to Cheltenham College and Pembroke College, Oxford, graduating in Jurisprudence in 1953, the year he joined the Labour Party. Called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1955, he took silk in 1971.
Richard fought South Kensington in 1959, then in 1964 captured Barons Court from the Conservatives. His campaign capitalised on private tenants’ fears of Rachmanism, but he devoted his maiden speech to the need for racial integration. On one occasion he walked out of a sauna in Haymarket – pausing only to dress and collect a refund – after hearing the manageress admit to a colour bar.
Richard nailed his colours early to the European mast. A delegate to the Council of Europe from 1965, he became vicechairman of its legal committee and secretary of the Labour Committee for Europe.
After the 1966 election, with Labour’s majority secured and his own trebled, Richard became PPS to Denis Healey, the Defence Secretary, a position from which he resigned early in 1969 to speak in support of Healey’s pro-nato policies. That October an approving Wilson made him Under-secretary for the Army.
In opposition from 1970, Richard became spokesman on posts and telecommunications. Yet his real interest was foreign affairs. In Europe or the Open Sea? (1971) he argued against Europe trying to rival America in developing nuclear weapons, and he was one of 30 Labour ex-ministers to vote with Edward Heath’s Conservatives to enter the EC.
He did not, however, rebel the following spring when Roy Jenkins led his troops into the “Aye” lobby – and exile – in the crucial vote on Europe, and was rewarded with promotion to James Callaghan’s foreign affairs team.
The February 1974 election brought the end of Heath’s government – and Richard’s Commons career. Barons Court disappeared under boundary changes, but at the last minute he was nominated for Blyth, Northumberland, defending a majority of 23,568. The sitting MP, Eddie Milne, had been deselected for highlighting alleged corruption in the party locally. Milne, fighting as an independent, held on by 6,140 votes.
Wilson then offered Richard the post of Permanent Representative at the UN where, to his distaste, he had also to cast Britain’s veto to save South Africa from expulsion.
Most of his time at the UN was taken up trying to break the deadlock in the Middle East, and with a quartet of problems in Africa: the threat to British subjects from Idi Amin in Uganda, pressure on South Africa to end apartheid, the civil war in Angola, and Ian Smith’s continued defiance in Rhodesia. This last was the most sensitive, since the UN held Britain responsible.
In October 1976 Callaghan, now Prime Minister, and his Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland convened a Geneva conference on Rhodesia and summoned Richard to chair it.
The conference got off to a bad start with the guerrilla leaders Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo demanding a visit from Crosland and payment by Britain of all their expenses. Smith flew home, then torpedoed the conference by rejecting British proposals for resuming it, leaving Richard a “sad and very disappointed man”.
Within weeks Crosland was dead and David Owen – whom Richard disliked – had taken his place.
On Labour’s defeat in 1979, Richard returned to the Bar. A year later, Callaghan nominated him as a European Commissioner in place of Jenkins.
Richard wanted the overseas development portfolio, but had to settle for social affairs. Much of his effort went into cushioning redundancy for tens of thousands of steelworkers across Europe, and pressing member states to tackle unemployment by investing and shortening the working week.
It was a difficult time to be Labour’s commissioner, with the party moving towards Euroscepticism. Yet Richard warned that anti-europeanism must not become a test for party membership, and that if Britain left the EC it might have to join the Soviet-led Comecon.
Though Labour was moving back toward the centre by the time his tenure came up for renewal in 1984 and Neil Kinnock, now leader, rated Richard, Mrs Thatcher refused to reappoint him, replacing him with Stanley Clinton Davis. In his envoi Richard observed: “It has been my unhappy experience to see proposal after proposal which I have presented to the Council of Ministers not accepted simply because the British, in total isolation, opposed them.”
Back at the Bar, Richard represented lesser defendants in the Brighton bomb trial and became a Bencher of the Inner Temple. In 1990 he was created a life peer. He became chief home affairs spokesman in the Lords and in 1992 was elected as Labour leader in the upper house; he was also sworn of the Privy Council.
Richard retained the Labour leadership in the Lords – and his ex officio place in the Shadow Cabinet – under John Smith and Blair, and on Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 he became Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the Lords, a post from which he was sacked during Blair’s first reshuffle.
Ivor Richard’s first two marriages, to Geraldine Moore in 1956 and Alison Imrie in 1962, ended in divorce. In 1989 he married, thirdly, Janet Jones, with whom he collaborated on Labour of Love: The Political Diary of a Cabinet Minister’s Wife (1999), a stinging account of acrimony and infighting in the Blair cabinet. She survives him, with a son from each of his marriages and a daughter from the second.
Lord Richard, born May 30 1932, died March 18 2018