Baroness Henig
Historian of the 20th century and ‘school prefect’ in the Lords
BARONESS HENIG, a deputy Speaker of the House of Lords, who has died aged 80, was previously an academic at Lancaster University, and Labour chairman of Lancashire County Council in 1999-2000.
A specialist in Modern European History, Ruth Henig was a fixture at the university from her arrival as a postgraduate in 1966, two years after its foundation, until her appointment as one of its first six Honorary Fellows in 2006.
Until their divorce, she worked in close partnership with her first husband Stanley Henig, MP for Lancaster from 1966 to 1970 and a colleague on the council. At the 1992 election, she herself stood as Labour candidate for his former seat, reducing the majority of the sitting Tory Elaine Kellett-bowman by two thirds.
The Henigs’ wedding at a Leicester synagogue in March 1966 was overshadowed by the Prime Minister Harold Wilson calling a snap general election in the hope of increasing the government’s tiny majority. The longplanned nuptials went ahead as the campaign in Leicester reached its critical stage – Stanley Henig’s soon -to-be-defeated Conservative opponent Humphry Berkeley characteristically sending his best wishes.
She was born Ruth Beatrice Munzer on November 10 1943, the daughter of Jewish refugees from the Netherlands. From Wyggeston Girls’ Grammar School in Leicester, she read History at Bedford College. After three decades as a lecturer, then senior lecturer, at Lancaster, she was appointed head of the History Department in 1995 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in 1997, serving until 2000.
Ruth Henig was first elected to Lancashire County Council in 1981, serving until 2005. She chaired the Lancashire Police Authority (1995-2005) and the Association of Police Authorities (1997-2005), and was on the National Criminal Justice Board, 2003-05.
The PM Tony Blair had her made a life peer in 2004 and in 2015 she was appointed one of the Lords Deputy Speakers. After time on the Woolsack, she likened her role to that of a “school prefect”.
Her work with policing led the Home Secretary, John Reid, in 2006 to appoint her chairman of the Security Industry Authority, and she oversaw the building of a modern regulatory regime – leading to her being given the Association of Security Consultants’ Award in 2013.
Stepping down that year, she continued to work for a unified voice for the security industry as president of the Security Institute from 2016, non-executive chairman of Securigroup and, from 2019, chairman of the Register of Chartered Security Professionals.
Her books include The League of Nations (1973); Origins of the Second World War (1985); Origins of the First World War (with Chris
Culpin, 1989); The Weimar Republic (1998); and Women and Political Power (with Simon Henig, 2000), among others.
She was a JP for Lancaster from 1984 to 2004, and at various times chairman of the Lancaster Adult College and a board member of the Duke’s Playhouse Theatre and Storey Creative Industries Centre, both in Lancaster. She was appointed CBE in 2000, and a Deputy Lieutenant for Lancashire in 2002.
Lady Henig was a lifelong supporter of Leicester City football club; she also played bridge for Lancashire from the early 1990s, and captained the House of Lords team.
Ruth Munzer married Stanley Henig in 1966; the marriage was dissolved in 1993. In 1994 she married, secondly, Jack Johnstone; he died in 2013. Her first husband survives her along with their two sons, one of whom, the psephologist Simon Henig, went on to be a politics lecturer at Sunderland University, leader of Durham County Council and chairman of the North East Combined Authority.