Lord Howie of Troon

Labour MP and civil engineer Born: March 2, 1924;

Died: May 26, 2018

WILL Howie, a life peer as Lord Howie of Troon, who has died aged 94, was a South Ayrshire civil engineer who became a controversial Labour MP at Westminster during the 1960s. He was also for many years an equally-controversial columnist for the Evening Times, The Herald’s sister paper. He had spells as the then Labour government’s senior whip and as vice-chairman of the parliamentary party and was a vocal opponent of what was then the European Economic Community, since grown into the European Union. He was a Brexiter long before the term was coined.

At the time considered on the far right of his party, he found himself in conflict with the “far left” of Labour. It would be a few decades after Will Howie’s time that Tony Blair’s Labour swung right and Conservative leaders edged left, bringing the term “centrist” into vogue. Mr Howie upset most of the House of Commons when he suggested abolishing the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQS) since, he said, it had degenerated into an Oxbridge-debate-style fiasco of two parties antagonizing each other while the real world’s problems went on outside. Mr Howie once described the Houses of Parliament as “a stylistic phoney”.

If Will Howie was controversial for what he said as an MP, he became equally known for what he did not say in the House of Lords. Appointed to the Lords as a life peer in 1978, he became known, or unknown, as one of the “silent peers”, those who either never showed up in the House or rarely spoke but nevertheless netted a healthy income.

However you label Will Howie politically, he was his own man, as uncompromising if not as poetic as the Bard Rabbie Burns who was born only a few miles away from Lord Howie’s own birthplace. He first got into the House of Commons in a by-election in Luton in 1963 after the incumbent, the Conservative MP Charles Hill, stepped down because he was granted a peerage and also took on a more lucrative job, head of the Independent Television Authority.

In the 1964 General Election, Mr Howie held on to the Luton seat by 723 votes. Two years later, he was re-elected with a majority of 2,464. But in the 1970 General Election, he lost his Luton seat to the Conservative Charles Simeons. Mr Howie’s term in the Commons was over after seven years. But old friends stick together and Mr Howie was made a life peer as Lord Howie on April 21, 1978, by his pal James Callaghan, Prime Minister at the time.

Will Howie was once sacked, in 1968, as a government whip by John Silkin, Chief Whip in Harold Wilson’s government, after attacking Mr Silkin’s tolerance of left-wing Labour rebels. When Mr Silkin reportedly told Mr Howie “you are no longer wanted,” the latter replied: “That’s the first decision I have ever agreed with you about.” Firmly anti-europe as a political union, Mr Howie called for a referendum on membership of what was then the European Economic Community as far back as 1962, 54 years before the historic referendum of 2016.

William Howie was born in Troon to Peter and Annie (Mcghee) Howie on March 2, 1924. After his father died, he was partly brought up by his fiercely-orange stepfather from Northern Ireland. He went to school at Marr College, Troon, before graduating BSC in engineering at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow. He started as a civil engineer in Glasgow in 1944 before moving to London after the war.

Aged 25, he decided to go into politics. He stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate for the City of London and Westminster in 1959. He made waves but the posh London and Westminster constituency was not ready for a straight-talking Scottish Labourite. In 1963, when Mr Howie won the Luton by-election, his campaign had been somewhat overshadowed by a leadership crisis within the Tory party, eventually won by Sir Alec Douglas Home ahead of Quintin Hogg and Rab Butler. On the same day Sir Alec Douglas-home was confirmed as Prime Minister, Mr Howie defeated the Tory candidate for Luton, Sir Alec’s chosen candidate Sir John Fletcher-cooke.

In Luton, much of the voting was about the key Vauxhall plant. The Vauxhall workers, and the constituency in general, did not buy into being represented by another “Sir” and so a majority voted for Mr Howie. To this day, older workers respect Lord Howie for helping save their jobs.

At one point during his Commons career, the future Lord Howie was named Comptroller of the Royal Household. That meant he had to give a daily account of parliamentary proceedings to the Queen. It is believed that Labour leader Harold Wilson was going to appoint Mr Howie to his cabinet in 1970 but Labour surprisingly lost that year’s election to the Tories under Edward Heath and Mr Howie lost his Luton seat. He returned to his profession as a civil engineer.

In that role, he became a vibrant campaigner on behalf of his profession. He was key to the creation of the Register of Engineers for Disaster Relief (now known simply as Redr), worldwide teams of engineers and other experts who can get to disaster zones within 48 hours to help reconstruct damaged water, sewerage or transport services. Even while an MP, he had served from 1964-67 as an outspoken council member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). In the 1980s, he wrote a regular column for the Evening Times, often writing about the engineering profession or industrial relations.

Lord Howie’s wife Mairi (née Sanderson), herself from Troon, died in 2005. He is survived by their sons Angus and Alexander and daughters Annabel and Alisoun.