Sir Alan Greengross
Conservative leader on the GLC who went on to campaign against his party’s plans to abolish it
SIR ALAN GREENGROSS, who has died aged 89, was Conservative opposition leader on the Greater London Council from 1983 until 1986 and found himself in the unhappy position of accepting the need for radical reform while campaigning against Margaret Thatcher’s government’s plans for the council’s abolition.
When, in April 1983, Greengross was elected leader of the Tory group on the GLC, it was reported that he had been chosen as a Thatcherite who would be more effective in challenging the GLC’S Labour leader, Ken Livingstone, than his predecessor, Richard Brew (who would be described in Livingstone’s 2011 memoirs You Can’t Say That as “plodding”). Yet within weeks of his appointment, the Conservative Manifesto for the general election on June 9 pledged to abolish the GLC, placing Greengross in a quandary.
Though the idea of abolishing the council and devolving its responsibilities to the boroughs had been mooted in secret for some time, the manifesto pledge came as a shock for many London Tories. Greengross himself only heard of the plans three days before the document was published and struggled to combine loyalty to the party leadership at a crucial time with keeping on board colleagues furious at what they saw as a betrayal.
“There can be little doubt that the reform of local government has become overdue,” Greengross said on May 19. “The financial excesses of the current GLC administration, and the way it is increasingly being used as a platform for confrontation, have made that inevitable.” But, he added, “there should be a democratically elected body to provide a voice for the jobs which must be done for London as a whole.”
Ministers were not for turning, and when Mrs Thatcher was re-elected, she could claim a democratic mandate for the plans. Greengross’s subsequent efforts to persuade the government to change its mind were not helped by the fact that the Conservative opposition to the plans in Parliament were led by the party’s former leader, Ted Heath. The GLC was abolished in March 1986.
It was to be another 14 years before the capital was given a new voice, in the form of the London Assembly and an elected mayor. In the meantime, Greengross was made a knight in 1986 for political and public services. “Compliant silence was rewarded with a knighthood,” was Ken Livingstone’s uncharitable verdict. After that, Greengross largely retired to the unelected world of quangos and directorships.
Alan David Greengross was born in London on April 15 1929, the younger of two children of Morris Greengross, a diamond tool manufacturer and broker who would serve as mayor of Holborn in the early 1960s, and his wife, Miriam.
He was educated at University College School, Hampstead, and, after National Service with the RAF, read Law at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a double First. He never practised as a lawyer, however, instead joining the family business, of which he would become chairman and managing director.
He cut his political teeth as a member, from 1957, of Holborn borough council and its successor body, Camden borough council, whose planning and communications committee he chaired from 1967 to 1971. Subsequently he served as deputy opposition leader, then opposition leader, until 1979.
He arrived at County Hall, representing Hampstead, when the Conservatives won the GLC elections in 1977, and was soon given important responsibilities, including the chairmanship of the Covent Garden planning committee and the North London area planning committee, and the leadership of the planning and communications policy committee. From 1979 to 1984 he was a member of the Port of London Authority.
Among other causes, Greengross pressed the case for the third London airport to be sited at Maplin rather than Stansted, and demanded that action be taken to ensure that foreign diplomats in London obeyed local parking regulations.
Following Ken Livingstone’s victory in the 1981 GLC elections he served as deputy leader of the opposition before becoming leader.
After the GLC was dissolved in 1986, Greengross chaired, at various times, the left-of-centre Tory Reform Group, the Institute for Metropolitan Studies, the Bloomsbury and Islington health authority and the London Regional Passengers’ Committee.
He also served as deputy chairman of the Rail Passengers Council, was a director of South West Trains, a visiting professor at the City of London Polytechnic (now London Guildhall University) and a member of the board of the business advocacy group London First. He was Deputy Lieutenant of Greater London in 1986.
A talented amateur artist, Greengross found relaxation painting landscapes in watercolours. In later years he and his wife Sally, an expert on ageing who in 2000 was raised to the peerage as Baroness Greengross, became active in voluntary work with young people. After the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 they helped a fishing community in Sri Lanka to recover from the disaster.
Greengross is survived by his wife and by their three daughters and a son.
Sir Alan Greengross, born April 15 1929, died August 13 2018