Lord Temple-morris
Conservative MP who crossed the floor and had a hand in the Northern Ireland peace process
LORD TEMPLE-MORRIS, who has died aged 80, turned Leominster into a Conservative stronghold for 23 years after narrowly saving it from the Liberals, before breaking with his party over Europe in 1997 and crossing the floor to Labour. He received a life peerage from Tony Blair on retiring from the Commons in 2001.
Silver-haired from youth and a barrister like so many leading Welsh Tories, Peter Temple-morris was moderation personified. But he proved a fighter in holding Leominster at the two 1974 elections, then retaining it by steadily larger majorities.
Temple-morris never held office; Margaret Thatcher would probably not have appointed him. But after a few months as PPS to his Cambridge friend Norman Fowler, he returned to the Bar with Mrs Thatcher’s blessing in October 1979.
His pretext was the difficulty of managing on a backbencher’s salary, but the reality was noble: he was working to secure the escape of his in-laws from Iran after the Islamic Revolution.
His wife Taheré, a Cambridge contemporary, was niece of the Shah’s former prime minister Assadullah Alam and daughter of his court chamberlain, Senator Khozieme Alam; Temple-morris had built contacts with the ruling New Iran party and defended the Shah’s human rights record. A grisly fate awaited the family at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards, and Templemorris organised and financed the escape of as many of them as possible.
Temple-morris was, nevertheless, one of the first British politicians to seek an accommodation with Tehran as the excesses of the revolution abated. In 1993 he criticised John Major’s decision to meet Salman Rushdie, believing that it would be seen as a provocation. He went on to chair the Iran Society and the British-iranian Chamber of Commerce, and to preside over the British-iranian Business Association.
At Westminster he served on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, headed the British Afghanistan Support Committee after the Soviet invasion, and chaired parliamentary groups for Lebanon, the Netherlands, Russia, South Africa and Spain. He was a leading light in the Inter-parliamentary Union, entertaining Mikhail Gorbachev on his first visit to Britain in 1984.
It was on Anglo-irish affairs that Templemorris made the greatest impact. Having chaired the working party on setting up the British-irish Inter-parliamentary Body, he served from 1990 to 1997 as its first British co-chairman, building bridges to the Dail (and developing contacts with Sinn Fein) and helping to create the climate for the Good Friday Agreement.
Through his involvement in the peace process, Temple-morris became comfortable with New Labour. Before the 1997 election he briefed Blair on the situation in Northern Ireland; he also discussed with Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell, whom he had known as a diplomat in Washington, how Labour with a small majority might get through legislation not only on Ireland but also on Europe.
When, with Labour in power, the Tories embraced Euroscepticism, Temple-morris agreed to cross the floor, then wavered. In November 1997 William Hague expelled him from the party, but it was the following June before he finally joined Labour.
Peter Temple-morris was born on February 12 1938, the only son of Judge Sir Owen and Lady Temple-morris. He was educated at Malvern College and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, chairing the University Conservative Association; his colleagues included Fowler and the future party chairman John Gummer.
Called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1962, he practised on the Wales and Chester Circuit and later in London, from 1971 as second prosecuting counsel to the Inland Revenue. He was also admitted a solicitor in 1989. He chaired the all-party solicitors’ parliamentary group and, for his final two years as a Tory, the Society of Conservative Lawyers. After leaving the Commons he was a consultant with the solicitors Moon Beever.
The young Temple-morris was a Bow Grouper and an early critic of Enoch Powell’s views on immigration. He contested Newport in 1964 and 1966 and Norwood in 1970 before winning the nomination for Leominster, where the veteran Clive Bossom was retiring, disheartened by the eclipse of Reginald Maudling, whose PPS he had been.
The constituency had not been nursed, and in the February 1974 election Templemorris did well to prevent the overturn of an 11,168 majority, scraping in by 1,619 votes. The Liberals now targeted the seat, and he had to pull out all the stops to hang on by 579 that October. It was a mark of his generosity and sang-froid that at the height of a bruising campaign he insisted on inviting the Daily Telegraph reporter covering the contest to lunch at his home.
Understandably, he at first concentrated at Westminster on constituency concerns, condemning the Labour government’s policy on rural rates and demanding curbs on exotic animals, after an escaped puma was recaptured on a local farm. By 1992 his majority exceeded 16,000.
From the moment Mrs Thatcher took office, Temple-morris was a potential rebel. He was one of eight backbenchers to vote against Sir Geoffrey Howe’s deflationary 1981 Budget, and broke ranks sporadically, notably over the poll tax. But he was never a potential recruit for the SDP; relations with local Liberals had left him with no love for third parties.
When Michael Heseltine challenged for the leadership in 1990, Temple-morris was an early supporter and spokesman. With the Iron Lady defeated and Major in Downing Street, Temple-morris’s constituency association confronted him with a no-confidence motion. Backed by Major, he repelled the challenge by 457 votes to 159, but the fissure did not heal.
Europe now became the touchstone for divisions in the party. In late 1991 Templemorris was one of several pro-european Tories to oust Eurosceptics in back-bench elections, but as tempers rose over the Maastricht treaty he increasingly found himself on the defensive, and co-founded a group called the Lollards to champion moderate Toryism.
Major upset Temple-morris by turning down an invitation to join his club, Buck’s. The slight was forgotten when Templemorris tried to block Michael Portillo from making a Eurosceptic pitch for the leadership, but a crackdown on dissent in 1994 brought a rebuke from the chief whip for him as well as the Euro-rebels.
When the former Tory vice-chairman Alan Howarth crossed the floor in 1995, Temple-morris called his departure “a symptom of the strain in the centre-left of the party”. Soon after, he infuriated his colleagues by telling a Dublin newspaper: “If I had my time again I would probably be New Labour or a Liberal Democrat.”
He insisted that he would remain a Tory, but faced challenges over the consideration he was giving to Sinn Fein, with the Telegraph declaring him “unfit to sit in the Conservative and Unionist interest”.
Temple-morris won a further vote of confidence and comfortably held his seat in 1997. But after Hague’s Shadow Cabinet ruled out membership of the euro in that Parliament, his messy move to Labour began.
From the Labour benches Temple-morris spoke up for Europe and an Irish settlement, but he could never have held his seat and did not seek re-election. He published a memoir, Across the Floor, in 2015.
Peter Temple-morris married Taheré Alam in 1964; she survives him, with their two sons and two daughters.
Lord Temple-morris, born February 12 1938, died May 1 2018