Roy Roebuck
Journalist, barrister and Labour MP who formed Harold Wilson’s controversial ‘Young Eagles’
ROY ROEBUCK, who has died aged 94, was a Fleet Street sub-editor who was briefly a Labour MP – and an outspoken supporter of Harold Wilson – before forsaking politics for the Bar.
Right-wing but anti-common Market, the never bashful Roebuck ruffled feathers by forming “Wilson’s Young Eagles” to demonstrate that Labour’s 1966 intake was not wholly opposed to the prime minister. The 10-strong group was wound up after complaints that it breached party rules.
Roebuck used the Commons to champion press freedom and speak out against newspaper closures. He secured a review of the law on contempt of court after the Attorney-general, Elwyn Jones, blocked press comment on the Aberfan disaster because an official inquiry was in progress.
He applauded the Postmaster General John Stonehouse for giving new local radio franchises to the BBC rather than permitting commercial radio, which he feared would endanger local papers; yet his defence of Wilson led him to shuttle between Westminster and Broadcasting House complaining of BBC “bias”.
Roebuck freelanced while an MP, writing a column from 1968 in the London Evening News. After filing a tirade against the firebrand Northern Ireland MP Bernadette Devlin, he discovered that she had been allocated the desk next to his at Westminster.
He campaigned for ministers to use plain English, eliciting an apology from Wilson for calling himself a “pragmatist” when he meant “empiricist”. Roebuck also conducted a then unsuccessful campaign for pill and medicine bottles to have childproof tops. Fitting tops children could open was, he said, like removing the safety catch from guns.
For his first year in the House, Roebuck was PPS to George Wigg, Paymaster General and Wilson’s unofficial intelligence chief, and from 1975 to 1983 he advised Wigg as president of the Betting Office Licensees’ Association. One of his first cases at the Bar was defending the 75-year-old Wigg against charges of kerb-crawling near Marble Arch.
Roebuck owed his election for Harrow East in 1966 to the exposure of the Conservative MP, Cdr Anthony Courtney, as the victim of a KGB “honey trap” while on a business trip to Moscow. Anonymous letters enclosing intimate photographs of Courtney with Zina Volkova, an Intourist guide, were sent to Courtney, his family, Sir Alec DouglasHome, the News of the World – which refused to publish, reckoning them fakes – and Private Eye, which ran the story despite knowing that the KGB were behind it.
Rumours of Courtney’s indiscretion spread in Harrow just as discontent over his performance as an MP was mounting, and although he survived an attempt to deselect him, he went into the election weakened. Roebuck challenged Courtney to “stop masquerading as a hero pursued by the Russians” and overturned his majority of 2,259 to squeak in by 378 votes; he attributed the result to Wilson’s popularity.
Roy Delville Roebuck was born in Manchester on September 25 1929 of Welsh Methodist stock. He claimed that his grandfather had been a champion milker, so riveted by his job that when introduced to strangers he would shake hands one finger at a time. He attended state schools and Manchester College of Commerce.
After National Service as an RAF radio operator in the Far East, Roebuck became a journalist, starting at the Stockport Advertiser. Moving to Fleet Street, he worked for the News Chronicle, Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Herald, and its successor, The Sun. He was also assistant editor of the Labour paper Forward.
In the Commons, he was an early rebel on the Common Market, claiming that Wilson had been misled by “Eurofanatics”. He praised George Brown for improving relations with America by removing George III’S portrait from his room at the Foreign Office, and railed against Rhodesian sanctions-busting by the French. He tried to needle the Conservatives over the “vetting” of candidates’ wives by asking ministers whether senior civil servants, military officers and the police had their wives interviewed before promotion.
Roebuck protested at the Sunday Express carrying the memoirs of the defector Kim Philby, asking how he was paid at a time of tight foreign exchange controls. He went on to query why the Inland Revenue allowed Gordon Lonsdale, another Soviet spy living in Moscow, to receive £10,000 tax-free from a publisher. The rules were changed.
When the seven-sided 50p appeared in 1969 as Britain prepared to introduce decimal currency, Roebuck complained to the Chancellor, Roy Jenkins, that old people were confusing it with the florin, worth one-fifth as much.
After losing his seat in 1970 to the Conservative Hugh Dykes, he read for the Bar, being called at Gray’s Inn in 1974. Thereafter he combined legal work and journalism, occasionally courting political controversy. He rebuked James Callaghan for appointing more special advisers instead of abolishing them, and before Labour’s return to power in 1997 accused Tony Blair of stealing the Tories’ clothes.
Roy Roebuck married Dr Mary Adams in 1957; they had a son, but she died in 1995.