Kevin Pakenham
City executive and author who followed his father Lord Longford into the field of prison reform
KEVIN PAKENHAM, who has died suddenly at 72, sustained a high-profile career in the City of London over five decades; but the youngest son of the Labour cabinet minister and penal reformer, Lord Longford, refused to conform to any stereotype and ranged widely in a vivid life that was lived to the full, embracing literature, politics and, latterly, his own tireless work for prisoners.
Youngest children in large families sometimes have to fight to make their voices heard, as he found growing up the eighth of eight in what was usually referred to as a political or a literary clan – his mother was the acclaimed historical biographer, Elizabeth Longford.
If his parents set the bar high, his brothers and sisters also gave him much to live up to. In 1969, when he was still at university, his oldest sibling, Antonia Fraser, published her biography of Mary Queen of Scots, his brother Thomas Pakenham The Year of Liberty, a study of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and another sister, Rachel Billington, All Things Nice, the first of her 22 novels.
While he always enjoyed a political debate, using his considerable wit to play devil’s advocate, he was only once, in the early 1980s, moved to throw his hat into the party-political ring, when he stood unsuccessfully as an SDP candidate in local elections.
His old friend Charles Moore characterised his political views as “anarchic conservative”, and that description applied equally to social conventions. When his theatre producer daughter Kate married, he insisted on traditional tails for the men, but walked her down the aisle pairing his own with shoes but no socks, and a panama hat.
The written word exercised a more profound hold on him. As a PPE student at New College, Oxford, in the Swinging Sixties, he founded Cover, a university magazine. In its pages, he published the first draft of “History”, a poem by Philip Larkin that opened with the much-quoted line, “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three …” (It was later to be renamed “Annus Mirabilis” when it appeared in Larkin’s collection High Windows.)
Even after 1972, when he was busy making a name for himself in the global asset management industry based in the City of London, he continued to write for his own satisfaction. In the late 1990s, approached by a publisher about becoming another “literary Longford”, he asked – sending himself up when telling the story – what subjects attracted the most book-buyers. Cats and golf, came the reply. So he wrote The Gathering Bunker in 1996, and A Green Too Far in 1998, funny tales from the fairways – a favourite haunt of his, along with the tennis court.
And in the months before his death, with the help of his third wife, the award-winning ITN correspondent, Ronke Phillips, he had been putting together a collection of his own poems. It will be published in November as Songs of Love.
Though there was no great family connection with the world of finance, his decision to choose a career in the City after doing postgraduate studies in Economics at St Antony’s College, Oxford, could be seen as a rebellion against all that his parents had instilled in him. He liked jokingly to describe himself as the only right-winger in a left-wing family. It was more complicated.
There were, of course, practical considerations. He had a family to support. More significantly, he enjoyed the competitive cut and thrust of the markets, and was highly accomplished at it, passing his enthusiasm on to his son Ben, who has followed in his footsteps.
Kevin John Toussaint Pakenham was born on November 1 1947 in north London. He was educated at St Philip’s, a Catholic prep school (his parents were converts), and he followed his brothers Thomas, Paddy and Michael, to Ampleforth College.
The year 1969 was traumatic for the family, with the death, in a car crash, of his journalist sister, Catherine. She was his next sibling up, and the two were close. He told one of his sons that for a period afterwards he would cry himself to sleep.
Her loss had a profound influence on him. If he inherited from his parents a strong sense of the value of hard work and making your mark in the world, then there was also in his make-up ever after Catherine’s death a determination to live life to the full. It gave him an ageless quality, forever relishing new ideas, new challenges, never stuck in any groove or era.
His career in the financial world, where his work focused on eastern Europe, saw him hold senior positions at Rothschild Intercontinental Bank, Ivory & Sime, American Express Bank, and F&C Management, before he became, from 1988, chief executive of the fund manager, John Govett and Co, and, from 1996, of AIB Asset Management.
In 2000 he joined Putnam Lovell, and from 2007 was managing director of Jeffries International. In 2011, with his usual audacity, he started Pakenham Partners, his own corporate finance advisory firm. In recent weeks it had been celebrating the successful completion of the latest two in its long list of deals.
His first marriage, shortly after leaving university, to the film and television producer Ruth Jackson, ended in 1984 after they had had two children together. Shortly afterwards, he married Clare Hoare, whose novels are published as Clare Harkness, with whom he had three children. It, too, ended in divorce.
In 2016, he met Ronke Phillips at a charity auction. He won her round by bidding over the odds for a painting she liked, and then presenting it to her. They married in 2018 at St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street.
In the acknowledgements to his forthcoming book of poems, he offers his thanks to “all those who have travelled the stormy seas, and particularly my wife Ronke, who has mastered the swell”.
The couple would sail his muchloved boat, Cheetah, out of Rye, cheerfully enduring many neardisasters in the process. He had, his lifelong friends said, found his soul mate.
Alongside his career in the City, and his writing, he shared his family’s long-standing commitment to making society a better place, as a trustee and treasurer of the Ireland Fund of Great Britain from 1989 to 2009, and from 2002 as the founding chairman of the Longford Trust, set up to continue his father’s commitment to rehabilitation as part of his high-profile mission as a prison reformer.
As fund-raiser in chief, his efforts sustained the trust’s work in supporting ex-prisoners through university and into careers.
If asked, he would have played down his part as “just the money man”. For all his love of impromptu speechmaking, he was a modest, self-effacing man, happiest spending time with his children and grandchildren, going for long walks, cold-water skinnydipping, or exploring an everexpanding list of new challenges, most recently producing the pen- and-ink drawing that will accompany Songs of Love, which is dedicated to his late sister, the poet Judith Kazantzis.
Kevin Pakenham is survived by his wife and by his children and stepchildren.
Kevin Pakenham, born November 1 1947, died July 19 2020