Aristocratic eco-warrior who became head of Greenpeace

Lord Melchett was an Old Etonian who turned his back on the establishment to become one of Britain’s best-known eco-warriors, said The Times. As executive director of Greenpeace, he was famously conciliatory in his manner: when the big oil companies realised they needed to address their environmental records in the 1990s, “they found Melchett’s door open” to them. “I can’t seem to get them off the phone nowadays,” he said of Shell, in 1997. But though he was willing to talk to “the enemy”, he insisted he was still a radical, and proved it in 1999, when he led boiler-suited activists in a raid to sabotage a government trial of GM maize in Norfolk. “A farcical scene ensued as an enraged farmer chased the protesters around the field in his tractor, shouting, ‘Melshit, Melshit, you’re a right democrat you are.’” Melchett was charged with criminal damage, but – in a surprise verdict – a jury found him not guilty.

Peter Robert Henry Mond, who has died aged 70, was born in 1948, into a family that owed its wealth to chemicals: his greatgrandfather had founded ICI in the 1920s. Brought up in Norfolk, he was sent to Eton where, aged 13, he became interested in environmentalism after reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Some years later, he became a vegetarian. He read law at Cambridge, then studied for a master’s in criminology at Keele. When his father died in 1973, he considered renouncing the title, but decided instead to join the Labour benches to champion the causes he had by then espoused, including squatters’ rights. He was soon made junior environment minister, in which role he chaired, in 1976, a committee that produced a favourable report on Britain’s music festivals: it earned him the nickname Lord Pop. Later, he was made minister of state at the Northern Ireland Office.

Yet the lure of direct action proved irresistible: in 1985, he joined a CND protest at a US air force base at Sculthorpe, Norfolk. He gave a speech, then started to cut through the perimeter wire. “I heard the fragrant voice of Lady Olga Maitland from the back of the crowd,” he recalled. “She cried: ‘Peter, Peter, don’t do it – it’ll ruin your career.’” He ignored her pleas, and was convicted of attempted criminal damage. A year later, he said that he’d had enough of the “lying game” of politics, and joined Greenpeace, where, among other things, he campaigned successfully to stop the Sellafield plant in Cumbria dumping toxic waste at sea. He resigned his executive position in 2001 and controversially accepted a consultancy role with the US PR company that had advised Union Carbide after the Bhopal disaster in India; it also worked with Monsanto. Meanwhile, he continued to work tirelessly for various community and environmental groups, including the Soil Association.