Lord Renton of Mount Harry
Moderate Tory foreign office minister who was Chief Whip at the time of Mrs Thatcher’s downfall
LORD RENTON OF MOUNT HARRY, who has died aged 88, was a genial and civilised middle-ranking minister under Margaret Thatcher and John Major and – crucially – Chief Whip during Mrs Thatcher’s fall from power. MP for Mid-sussex for 23 years, Tim Renton was a radical on the economy (he advocated independence for the Bank of England 20 years before it came to pass), but liberal on social issues. Having been Minister of State at the Foreign and Home Offices, he owed his promotion to Chief Whip in 1989 to his friendship with Sir Geoffrey Howe, whom Mrs Thatcher had just made her deputy but with whom relations were deteriorating.
Renton was a surprising choice for this most sensitive of posts, for he was essentially an upper class, pro-european, Tory paternalist. He and Mrs Thatcher lacked the customary rapport between a chief whip and the leader, and he was too gentlemanly to exercise the ruthlessness required in the post.
When Renton rebuked the maverick Nicholas Winterton for his poor voting record and frequent rebellions, Winterton accused him of impertinence. Renton did secure the suspension from the House of another backbencher, John Browne, for failing to disclose financial interests, only for Browne to table a motion accusing him of “grotesque and deliberate injustice”.
Renton’s closest political friends were John Biffen and Howe; in Biffen’s view Renton owed his promotion to a final attempt by Mrs Thatcher to rebuild fences with Sir Geoffrey. Yet he did have, to the prime minister, the great advantage of not being Tristan Garel-jones, deputy chief whip when the post fell vacant, whom she trusted even less.
After her downfall, Mrs Thatcher’s supporters accused Renton of betrayal for refusing to throw the power of the Whips’ Office behind her when Michael Heseltine launched his challenge.
In her memoirs she described his assessments of backbench opinion as “characteristically disturbing”. Yet after the inconclusive first ballot she thanked Renton for his support; he – after consulting Viscount Whitelaw – told her she faced defeat on the second.
When in 1989 Sir Anthony Meyer launched his “stalking-horse” challenge to Mrs Thatcher, Renton assured him that the whips would remain strictly neutral, and when Heseltine posed a far more serious threat a year on, he stuck to his guns.
His first duty, he maintained, was to keep the parliamentary party stable in a bruising contest. Renton said he had to be impartial and truthful, adding: “She could not face the truth.” What he perceived after the first ballot was that even if Mrs Thatcher fought on to gain a small majority, her authority had been fatally undermined.
In Herself Alone, the third volume of his biography of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore depicted Renton as part of a conspiracy among “the elders of the tribe” who, after the results of the first ballot came through, cooperated “to ensure the removal of the woman whose candidacy they were publicly committed to support”; Moore observed, however, that the fact that they did conspire “does not prove… that they were wrong to do so”.
It was their behaviour that Mrs Thatcher would later describe on television as “treachery with a smile on its face”.
Having helped to secure a smooth transition to John Major’s leadership, Renton told Major that he did not wish to remain chief whip, and became Arts Minister, a job he relished.
His distaste for the seamier side of politics emerged in a well-received novel which came out in 1994, The Dangerous Edge. It painted an unflattering picture of double-dealing among Conservative MPS. Nor did he spare the whips: “Little Hitlers in depressingly grey suits.” When his wife published Winter Butterfly, depicting a philandering MP, Renton countered with Hostage to Fortune (1997), featuring a politician’s wife addicted to gambling. He went on to produce The Chief Whip: The Role, History and Black Arts of Parliamentary Whipping (2004), which gave little away.
Renton’s puckish side surfaced in the House. When Dennis Skinner asked him: “How many civil servants in employment at the latest date are (a) men or (b) women?”, he replied: “All of them.”
He was also amused when, in a story on his promotion to foreign office minister with responsibility for Hong Kong, a British newspaper mistakenly reported that he had ventured into showbusiness, playing Great Uncle Bulgaria in The Wombles.
“Some weeks later,” Renton explained in a Commons debate, “I discovered that papers such as the South China Morning Post had run headlines stating: ‘New Hong Kong Minister ex-pop star’.”
Ronald Timothy Renton was born on May 28 1932, the younger son of
RKD Renton, a lawyer and parliamentary agent, and his wife Eileen. He won scholarships to Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, and after taking a First in History joined the merchant bankers C Tennant Sons & Co.
He spent five years with them in Canada, and from 1964 to 1973 was managing director of Tennant Trading. He sat on several boards, was a member of the London Metal Exchange for many years and a Name at Lloyd’s; he philosophically accepted heavy losses in the early 1990s, rather than join what he dismissed as “the whingeing brigade”.
Renton chaired the Kensington and Lewes Conservative associations, and in 1970 contested the firmly Labour Park division of Sheffield. Complimenting a steelworker on the primroses in his garden, Renton told him: “Did you know primroses were Disraeli’s favourite flower?” “Is that so?” came the reply. “I’ll dig the buggers up tomorrow.”
His home constituency, Mid-sussex, fell vacant before the February 1974 election and Renton was chosen.
At Westminster he challenged James Callaghan to “have the guts” to cut spending. He tabled Bills to tighten the Obscene Publications Acts and give property owners greater hope of regaining possession if they let out parts of their homes, and called for the parliamentary rifle range to make way for a pool and sauna.
In the run-up to the 1979 election he spoke from the front bench on trade and industry, but Mrs Thatcher did not offer him a job; instead he became PPS to Biffen at the Treasury. He moved on with Biffen to the Department of Trade, but in 1981 resigned over the government’s planned windfall tax on banks.
As president of the Conservative Trade Unionists and a member of the white-collar union Apex, Renton worked to weaken the unions’ links with Labour.
He was not a hawk on union reform – defeating Michael Shaw, who wanted more radical change, for the chair of the party’s backbench employment committee – but did move to toughen Norman Tebbit’s Bill by requiring secret ballots for all national union officials.
Early in 1983 Howe, still Chancellor, made Renton his PPS. They moved to the Foreign Office that summer, and in September 1984 Renton entered the government as Parliamentary Undersecretary at the FCO, and then Minister of State. After Sir Geoffrey concluded the agreement to transfer Hong Kong to China in 1997, Renton handled its implementation.
Visiting the colony, he tried to reassure its politicians that Britain was resisting Chinese pressure to limit political reforms. In Beijing he guaranteed China a “period of consultation” before making changes; Beijing took this as a right of veto.
As relations with the Soviet Union began to thaw, he gave in 1986 a ground-breaking interview with Pravda. He was fairly reported, but the accompanying commentary labelled him “gentlemanly, cunning, one-sided and selfish”.
In Moscow soon after, he claimed that Mikhail Gorbachev wanted Mrs Thatcher to win the coming election because he trusted her defence policies; a successful visit by the “Iron Lady” followed.
After the election Mrs Thatcher moved Renton to the Home Office under Douglas Hurd. With Hurd, he worked up plans for the Broadcasting Standards Council, and a Radio Authority with “a light touch and sharp teeth”. He categorised their 1988 Broadcasting White Paper as “sensible liberalisation, without giving in to the Visigoths and Vandals”.
Another challenge was newspapers’ cavalier attitude to the Press Council; Renton set up the Calcutt Committee to review the libel laws, warning editors it was their “last chance” to curb excesses or face legal restrictions.
Made Chief Whip in the reshuffle following Nigel Lawson’s resignation, Renton did his best to stop Mrs Thatcher’s relationship with Howe deteriorating, and negotiated – to the relief of backbench Tories – a resumption of pairing with Labour, who had broken it off.
Major, coming to office, made him Minister for the Arts. Throughout 17 months in post, Renton’s priority was get more money into the arts and cut back on bureaucracy.
He proposed that companies like the Royal Opera House and National Theatre be funded direct by government – infuriating five former Arts Council chairmen – and after leaving office called for the council’s abolition.
As the 1992 election neared, Renton secured a manifesto commitment to set up a National Lottery, some of whose proceeds would go to the arts. The election won, he left the government, Major putting the arts under a new Department of National Heritage headed by David Mellor.
Renton had one item of unfinished business: the first National Music Day that June, with 1,548 events across the country; he was its founding president, with Mick Jagger.
He then became vice-chairman of the British Council, and from the back benches pressed for ratification of the Maastricht treaty as Major came under pressure from the Eurosceptic Right, whom he accused of “thinking the earth is flat”.
He also became chairman of Interactive Telephone Services, which in 1994 launched a telephone game with a £250,000 monthly jackpot. Labour’s Mo Mowlam claimed he had made use of knowledge gained in helping prepare for the Lottery; he denied the charge and Major stood by him. The game was suspended after two months as police investigated, and a year later ITS, from which Renton had resigned, was fined by Southampton Magistrates for running an illegal lottery.
Renton left the Commons at the 1997 election and was created a life peer. He chaired one of the Lords’ EC subcommittees from 2003 to 2006. He was appointed Deputy Lieutenant for East Sussex in 2004.
At home on the Downs he and his wife cultivated champagne grapes and marketed the sparkling wine made from them. He was never happier than when pruning the vines, or in the Hebrides pulling up a lobster pot with the grandchildren helping.
Tim Renton married, in 1960, Alice Fergusson, who survives him with two sons and two daughters; their daughter Polly, an acclaimed documentary film-maker, died in a road accident in 2010.
Tim Renton, born May 28 1932, died August 25 2020