Sir Peter Viggers
Long-serving Tory MP brought down by his attempt to claim expenses for a floating duck house
SIR PETER VIGGERS, who has died aged 82, represented his native Gosport assiduously in the Commons for 36 years, but will be remembered as the Conservative MP who claimed £1,645 on his expenses for a floating duck house.
The claim – revealed by The Daily Telegraph in May 2009 – was rejected by the Fees Office. But a duck became the symbol of the paper’s campaign exposing MPS’ expenses, and as Sir Peter admitted to a “ridiculous and grave error of judgment”, David Cameron ordered him to retire at the next election.
The scandal claimed more prestigious scalps; Speaker Michael Martin was forced to resign for misjudging the public mood. It also brought to light criminally fraudulent claims, and others of sheer absurdity, such as one from Douglas Hogg (Viscount Hailsham) for cleaning his moat. But the image of the duck house stuck.
Sir Peter – a popular figure at Westminster – had told his local paper at the outset: “Personally, I have of course always scrupulously observed the rules.” Those rules enabled him to claim more than £30,000 for “gardening”, including 28 tons of manure; much of this he repaid.
Then the Telegraph disclosed that he had made the most ridiculous claim of all. The “Stockholm” duck house was based on an 18th-century building in Sweden; 5ft high, it had a bridge for the birds to climb aboard, and shelter from the elements.
“Ashamed and humiliated” as ridicule broke over him, Sir Peter said the house was “never liked by the ducks”; he had put it into storage, to be sold for charity.
The scandal, in the evening of Viggers’s career, overshadowed a lifetime spent championing his constituents and the Royal Navy – including his securing of HMS Alliance (1945) as the centrepiece of Gosport’s Submarine Museum – and three years in Margaret Thatcher’s government.
Peter John Viggers was born at Gosport on March 13 1938, the son of Sidney Viggers, a local government officer, and the former Evelyn Badcock. Educated at Portsmouth Grammar School, he did his National Service as a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force; later he was commissioned into 457 (Wessex) Regt RA (TA). Going up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Viggers chaired the university Conservative Association in 1960. Admitted solicitor in 1967, he became company solicitor to Chrysler UK; a merchant banker; chairman of Richardson Smith; a director of oil, hotel, textile, pharmaceutical and venture capital companies; and a “Name” at Lloyd’s.
In February 1974 he was elected for Gosport. During the campaign Viggers electioneered with the yachtsman Sir Alec Rose from a Portsmouth Harbour ferry.
In Parliament he was one of 27 Tories to force a vote against Denis Healey’s Budget. Michael Heseltine made Viggers his contact with the electronics industry as he fought Labour’s nationalisation plans,
When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Viggers became PPS to the Solicitor-general, Sir Ian Percival. On a delegation to Taiwan, he found half the output of its largest textile factory labelled “Made in Huddersfield”.
During the Falklands conflict, anxious Navy wives complained to Viggers over the lack of information about setbacks; he condemned the Mod’s delay in confirming the sinking of the destroyer Coventry, with the loss of 20 lives.
In 1984 Mrs Thatcher appointed Viggers party coordinator for defence and disarmament. He took up claims that Soviet agents had infiltrated the Greenham women’s peace camp.
Viggers joined the government in September 1986 as Parliamentary Under-secretary for Northern Ireland. With the government seeking a buyer for Short Brothers, he fell out with its chairman Robert Lund who blamed Viggers for leaks linking the company’s forthcoming results to a possible break-up and threatened to sue.
Viggers left the government in July 1989. From 1991 to 1993 he served on the Select Committee on Members’ Interests. He also had three spells on the Defence Select Committee, ultimately as vice-chairman.
A vice-president of the RNLI, Viggers nearly lost his life at sea in 1993. During a race in gale-force winds off the Isle of Wight, he fell from the yacht Lilya with no safety line or life jacket. He was pulled aboard a competing yacht, having “shut my eyes and thought of John Major”. Ashore he said: “How I found myself on board in those conditions without a life jacket I do not know. It was insane and I deserve to be horsewhipped.”
Viggers was a council member of Lloyd’s from 1992 to 1996, as losses of £2 billion came home to roost. With ruined Names claiming they had been diverted into unprofitable syndicates, Viggers appealed to them to back the council. From 1996 he chaired Lloyd’s pension fund.
For 23 years Viggers sat in the North Atlantic Assembly, chairing its political committee from 2000 to 2004. He chaired the British-japanese Parliamentary group and during the 1990s chaired Tracer Petroleum. He was knighted in 2008 and left the House at the 2010 election.
In retirement in 2018, Viggers was criticised in a report from James Jones, former Bishop of Liverpool, for not having taken up constituents’ complaints about the overprescribing of opioids at Gosport War Memorial Hospital. The inquiry found that 456 mainly elderly patients had died after receiving excessive or unnecessary medication. Faced with the complaints, Viggers had said: “I like and know the hospital and the people there and would like the issue to be allowed to rest.”
Peter Viggers married Dr Jennifer Mcmillan in 1968; they had two sons and a daughter.
Sir Peter Viggers, born March 13 1938, died March 19 2020