Green campaigner Lord Peter Melchett dies at 71
Aristocratic eco-warrior who famously led Greenpeace activists in the invasion of a GM crop trial
“Fearless pioneer” Lord Peter Melchett has died aged 71 after a colourful life as an environmental campaigner and Labour peer.
A court case in 1999 saw the organic farmer face criminal damage charges alongside 27 fellow activists after ripping up genetically modified crops. Lord Melchett, who became executive director of Greenpeace UK in 1989, and his colleagues were acquitted when the jury accepted their defence that they believed the crop would have polluted the environment.
He was a Labour party whip and a junior environment minister under Harold Wilson, then Northern Ireland minister under Jim Callaghan.
THE 4th LORD MELCHETT, the former chairman and executive director of Greenpeace who has died aged 70, came into an inheritance largely based on the development of modern chemicals, but devoted much of his life to campaigning to rid the world of the fruits of scientific progress, particularly genetically modified (GM) crops.
A great-grandson of Sir Alfred Mond, founder of Britain’s chemicals giant ICI, Lord Melchett turned his back on a privileged upbringing at Eton and Cambridge to become a socialist, a vegetarian and a radical environmental activist. A man of obdurate certainties (among other things, he never married the mother of his children so that no son of his could inherit a title), Melchett became a hate figure to many farmers and industrialists who regarded him as an irresponsible crackpot.
Melchett earned his spurs in 1999 at the head of a detachment of boiler-suited activists who trashed a field of genetically modified maize at Lyng, Norfolk. The maize had been developed to be resistant to insect damage and offer an alternative to pesticides, and was being grown as part of the government’s farm-scale trials of GM crops.
The clash at Walnut Tree Farm between Melchett, his 27 supporters and the enraged farmer whose maize it was (“Melshit, Melshit,” he was heard shouting at the peer, “you’re a right democrat, you are”) became the stuff of legend. Melchett was arrested and spent two nights on remand in jail in Norwich, but in a surprise verdict was cleared by a jury of causing criminal damage, a result hailed by the defendant, without apparent irony, as “a victory for farmers all over Britain”.
A staunch opponent of country sports, Melchett seemed to represent everything the traditional countryman most abhors. But he was by no means ignorant about the rural economy. On his 800-acre Courtyard Farm at Ringstead, near the Wash in Norfolk, he put his theories into practice by converting to organic production, planting trees, making new paths and improving habitats, creating a haven for wildflowers, wildlife and visitors.
There was, therefore, glee in some quarters when in 2002 he was forced to resign from his position on the board of Greenpeace International, following a furore over his acceptance of a lucrative “social responsibility” consultancy with the public relations firm Burson-marsteller, a bête noir of environmentalists.
The company had advised Union Carbide in the wake of the chemical leak in Bhopal, India, and had also banged the drum for the
GM firm Monsanto. Suddenly, Melchett found himself on the receiving end of the sort of tendentious publicity he had dished out to others in his Greenpeace days.
“Peter Melchett used to be a spanner in the works,” gloated a spokesman for one GM conglomerate, “but now he’s the works itself. This entry into the real world is to be welcomed, and his great-grandfather would be very proud of him.”
His time with the PR firm was short-lived, however, and he returned to the anti-gm fray as policy director at the highly respected (and peaceable) organic body the Soil Association, where he was responsible for launching “Food for Life”, a programme to improve the quality of school meals, working with Jamie Oliver to get junk food like Turkey Twizzlers banned from schools, and new standards introduced.
Peter Robert Henry Mond was born on February 24 1948 into the wealthy Mond family, which had arrived from Germany to settle in England in 1864. His great-grandfather, Sir Alfred Mond, had developed his chemical company Brunner Mond into ICI, making a fortune and buying up the Norfolk estate where his greatgrandson would spend his childhood years. Sir Alfred was raised to the peerage as Lord Melchett in 1928, and Peter’s father, Julian, would become chairman of the British Steel Corporation in the Wilson era. His mother, Sonia, was a noted literary hostess and socialite.
Melchett always played down his background: “Dad was bust after the war,” he recalled, “and we lived in rented cottages.” By his teens, however, the family fortunes had recovered sufficiently to send Peter to Eton, where he was known as “demimond” because of his casual attitude to clothes.
His conversion to fully fledged environmental activism began when, aged 13, he found some dead partridge chicks. He was told they had died of thirst, but when he read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, he concluded that they must have been poisoned by pesticides. Social radicalism and vegetarianism came later: “I went beagling and fox-hunting at school,” he recalled. “In my early twenties, I decided this was bizarre behaviour.”
He read Law at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but, because of a disease of the colon that nearly killed him, did not take his Finals. Instead he took a master’s degree in Criminology at the University of Keele, followed by 18 months at the LSE researching the problems of cannabis addiction. (In the late 1970s Melchett would become founder chairman of a short-lived Legalise Cannabis campaign.)
In 1973, when he was 25, Peter Mond succeeded to the peerage, on his father’s sudden death from a heart attack. By now thoroughly at odds with the establishment, he considered renouncing the title, but found himself being courted by Labour politicians desperate to improve their representation in the House of Lords. His maiden speech was about cruelty to animals in zoos.
Melchett quickly made a name for himself as a hard worker. He became a whip and then a junior Environment minister before being promoted to minister of state at the Northern Ireland Office under James Callaghan, where he caused a minor sensation by apparently being the first politician in the Province to have heard of the Boomtown Rats. In 1976 he chaired a working party on pop festivals, concluding that they were “a good thing”. He was a regular at Glastonbury.
After the Tory election victory of 1979, Melchett became an opposition spokesman on the environment, leading for the opposition on the Wildlife and Countryside Bill, which became an Act in 1981.
But the lure of direct action soon drew him away from conventional politics. In 1985 he joined a CND protest outside the American air force base at Sculthorpe, near his farm in Norfolk. After making a speech, he tried to cut through the perimeter wire. “Then I heard the fragrant voice of Lady Olga Maitland from the back of the crowd. She cried: ‘Peter, Peter, don’t do it – it’ll ruin your career.’” Thus spurred on to greater efforts, Melchett was convicted and fined for attempted criminal damage.
The next year, announcing himself sick of the “lying game” of Westminster politics, he withdrew from Parliament to become chairman of Greenpeace. He only returned briefly to the House of Lords to vote for the abolition of hereditary peers.
Melchett’s arrival at Greenpeace heralded a period of professionalism. Some said the organisation became rather stodgy and puritanical, losing some of its humour and flash. But during his time, first as chairman and later as executive director, it grew from an organisation with a turnover of £1.4million, 12 staff and 25,000 supporters to a turnover of £7.5million, 80 staff and more than 200,000 supporters.
“Truth is our strength,” Melchett would tell interviewers. “We must be as independent and uncompromising as possible.”
Among his proudest achievements were Greenpeace’s campaigns to stop the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant dumping barrels of nuclear waste at sea, and to prevent Shell from tipping its redundant North Sea storage buoy Brent Spar in the Atlantic.
Not everyone agreed that Greenpeace’s solutions necessarily offered the best environmental option, and in the case of Brent Spar the organisation got into trouble for basing its campaign on wildly inaccurate estimates of toxins on the oil platform. But whatever the facts, Greenpeace always claimed the moral high ground. Industrialists often had to beat a hasty retreat.
The invasion of Walnut Tree Farm in 1999 represented a change of pace and was looked on with disapproval by some in the movement, who argued that it was better to recruit farmers as allies rather than alienate them with campaigns of sabotage. None the less, Melchett’s decision to resign as executive director of Greenpeace the following year was a shock, because it came at a point when he had achieved the highest profile of any British environmental activist for years.
From 1979 to 1986 he served as part-time chairman of Community Industry, a government-funded scheme which employed young people in deprived areas, and for more than 30 years he was a patron of Prisoners Abroad. But his main interests lay in the environment and he served, at various times, as chairman of Wildlife Link, president of the Ramblers’ Association, a council member of the RSPB, a trustee of WWF UK and an adviser to Friends of the Earth and the RSPCA.
He was a special lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Nottingham (1984-2002), a member of the BBC’S Rural Affairs Committee from 2005, of the government’s Rural Climate Change Forum (2009-10) and Organic Action Plan Group (2002-08), and sat on the Department of Education’s School Lunches Review Panel (2005).
Lord Melchett is survived by his partner Cassandra, a painter and photographer, and by their son and daughter.
The 4th Lord Melchett, born February 24 1948, died August 29 2018