Lord Stewartby
Cautiously Eurosceptic minister under Margaret Thatcher who was also an expert on historic coins
LORD STEWARTBY, who has died aged 82, was a competent if unflashy minister under Margaret Thatcher, and also one of Britain’s most respected numismatists. Representing Hitchin and then North Hertfordshire between 1974 and 1992, Ian Stewart was politically moderate and cautiously Eurosceptic. A former banker, he proved a valuable lieutenant to Sir Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson.
In 1983 Howe took the unusual step of defending Stewart – then his PPS – against criticism for having spoken little in the House. His performances as a minister were sure-footed, but led the Telegraph’s Godfrey Barker to describe him as “the just plain boring face of capitalism”.
His main achievements as a minister were to prepare the ground for the demutualisation of building societies and the Trustee Savings Bank, and push through legislation to tighten banking regulation, then in the hands of the Bank of England.
Stewart’s fascination with coins was sparked when, in wartime Barnet, he noticed a copper disc in a jar on a grocer’s shop counter with two heads on it; he recognised it as being from the reign of William & Mary.
As a schoolboy he discovered that no complete book on the coinage of Scotland had been published since 1887, so wrote his own, Scottish Coinage, which was published by Spink and Son in 1955. He wrote several further books on the Scottish and English coinage.
In 2007 the oldest part of Stewartby’s collection of Scottish coins, dating back to the 12th century and worth £500,000, was stolen from his home near Peebles. A £50,000 reward was offered for their return and an appeal on Crimewatch five years later brought 40 calls from the public, but to no avail.
However, the bulk of Stewartby’s collection eluded the thieves, and in 2016 Spink auctioned his English coins, many of them Anglo-saxon, at five separate sales. The third alone involved 152 lots of gold pieces from Edward III to George III. His remaining Scottish coins – three quarters of the original total – he donated to the Hunterian collection at Glasgow University.
The reward for the stolen coins lapsed with his death.
Bernard Harold Ian Halley Stewart was born in London on August 10 1935, the son of the medical professor emeritus HC Stewart and his wife Dorothy (née Lowen). His great-grandfather was the Liberal MP and philanthropist Sir Halley Stewart, who developed Stewartby brickworks and model village in Bedfordshire. The family added “of Stewartby” to its surname, and Stewartby himself became president of the Sir Halley Stewart Trust.
After Haileybury, he did his National Service with the RNVR, continuing in the reserve to become a lieutenant-commander. In 1956 he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, taking a First in Classics. He captained the university tennis team in 1958 and 1959 as first string against Oxford, and led the first Oxford & Cambridge rackets team to the US.
Stewart went into the City with the bill brokers Seccombe, Marshall and Campion, then in 1960 joined the bankers Brown, Shipley, becoming a director in 1971. Edward Heath had worked at Brown, Shipley, and in 1965 Stewart did a special study of economic and monetary problems for the Tory leader’s economic policy group.
He fought Hammersmith North in 1970, then was selected for Labour-held Hitchin. Boundary changes made the seat safe for the Conservatives, and he won it by 4,018 votes, holding it comfortably thereafter.
When, in 1976, he resisted proposals for a bypass round Baldock, Private Eye accused him of favouring a local landowner on whose estate he had a cottage.
Stewart was appointed to the Select Committee on Expenditure in 1977 and, after Mrs Thatcher swept to power in 1979, became Howe’s PPS. Soon he became Parliamentary Under-secretary for Defence Procurement, but after nine months returned to the Treasury as Economic Secretary under Lawson.
There he served on the EEC’S Budgetary Council, and piloted through the Trustee Savings Banks Act 1985 and the Building Societies Act 1986 – in each case resisting pressure to slow the pace of demutualisation – and the Banking Act of 1987.
After the 1987 election, Stewart was promoted to Minister for the Armed Forces. He visited the Gulf several times during the Iran-iraq War, and played a straight bat over the disappearance of the log of Conqueror, the submarine that had sunk the General Belgrano, and SAS activities in Gibraltar.
Impressed, Mrs Thatcher first made him a Privy Counsellor, then in July 1988 moved him sideways to take charge of security in Northern Ireland.
Here he stonewalled calls for an inquiry into allegations by Colin Wallace, the former intelligence operative, of dirty tricks against mainland British politicians by elements in the security services. Subsequent events would largely vindicate Wallace.
He stood down as a minister in July 1989 after sustaining a back injury. He was knighted in 1991 and the following year was made a life peer, sitting in the upper house until 2015.
Stewartby was honorary keeper of Medieval Coins at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Ian Stewart married in 1966 Deborah Buchan, daughter of the 3rd Baron Tweedsmuir. She survives him, with their son and two daughters.
Lord Stewartby, born August 10 1935, died March 1 2018