Historian who hosted a secret dinner for Mrs Thatcher
As a young man, the historian Hugh Thomas called for the destruction of Britain’s “fusty Establishment”, stood as a Labour candidate, and wrote an account of the Spanish Civil War that was banned by the Francoist regime. Yet he later became an advisor to Margaret Thatcher, and chairman of her favourite think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies. In the autumn of 1982, he hosted a secret dinner party at his house in Ladbroke Grove, at which the Iron Lady was the guest of honour. Perceiving that she needed to build bridges with the world of letters, he decided to introduce her to some of its luminaries: among the 12 guests (all male) were Tom Stoppard, Al Alvarez, Anthony Powell, V.S. Pritchett, Philip Larkin, Isaiah Berlin and Mario Vargas Llosa (or “some Panamanian novelist”, as one guest put it).
Thomas’s party was not, it seems, the most convivial of evenings. Though the guests agreed not to talk about it publicly, the deathobsessed Larkin wrote, in a letter to his friend Andrew Motion: “The Thatcher dinner was pretty grisly. Even now I shudder and moan involuntarily. M. [Monica Jones, his partner] says: ‘Is it death again, or Mrs Thatcher?’ I wipe the froth from my lips (usually beer froth) and try to stop twitching.” Yet he later professed himself a fan of the PM, telling Kingsley Amis that he’d thought about “kissing the ground she treads”. As for Al Alvarez, he told the journalist Nigel Farndale that Thatcher had possessed a “dazzling aura of power”, and that he’d found her rather attractive, although he’d been dismayed by her lack of humour. He suspected that she hadn’t known who most of her fellow diners were. “Dick Francis was more her speed.”
Born in 1931, Thomas was the only son of Hugh Thomas, a British colonial officer based in what was the Gold Coast (now Ghana), and his wife, Margery (née Swynnerton), who worked in the Colonial Nursing Service. Educated at Sherborne, he went from there to Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he read history, and became president of the union in 1953. It was while working at the Foreign Office that he became a fervent supporter of the Labour Party. For him, the main attraction, said The Daily Telegraph, was its “internationalism”.
In the late 1950s, he threw in his job to write full time – a risky enterprise for a man with expensive tastes and no private income. But he had a lucky break in 1959, when a chance conversation with an American publisher led to a commission to write his blockbuster history of the Spanish Civil War. The book proved a turning point: not only did it become a bestseller, but while working on it he met Vanessa Jebb (daughter of Gladwyn Jebb), who became his wife. Thousands of copies of the book (which remains in print) were smuggled into Spain. He then became professor of history at Reading University, where he wrote his next book, the 1,700-plus-page Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom (1971). His knowledge of, and contacts in, the Hispanic world proved valuable to Thatcher during the Falklands War, said The Independent. Indeed, it was Thomas who informed No. 10 that the Belgrano had been sunk: he’d heard it from the Peruvian prime minister. Thomas’s other books included a trilogy about the Spanish Empire, and a history on the Atlantic Slave Trade from the 15th century to abolition.
By the mid-1970s, he was growing disenchanted with the Labour Party, partly because of its lack of enthusiasm for the European project. He defected to the Tories and was made a life peer in 1981, as Lord Thomas of Swynnerton. He was a natural Thatcherite in so far as he distrusted the State and embraced free market libertarianism, but the party’s growing Euroscepticism tested his allegiance; Thomas switched to the Lib Dem benches in 1997, and eventually became a cross-bencher.