Byronic aristocrat who served as Thatcher’s arts minister
Grey Ruthven, Lord Gowrie 1939-2021
Lord Gowrie, who has died aged 81, was a somewhat unlikely member of Margaret Thatcher’s second Cabinet. A Byronic-looking aristocrat, he wrote poetry, was a former lecturer in American and English literature, and had a penchant for bow ties. He looked more like a flâneur than a Thatcherite politician, said The Guardian. The manner in which he left her government was unusual too. Gowrie was not driven out by scandal or incompetence. In 1985, he resigned as arts minister and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, saying that it was quite impossible to live in central London on his salary of £33,000 a year. (At the time, this was a “comfortable executive salary.”) The furore and ridicule this prompted rather overshadowed his achievements, which included overseeing the inauguration of Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North. He later admitted that he had been “extraordinarily stupid”. He now realised, he said, that “in politics it can be illadvised not to put a gloss upon the truth”.
Alexander Patrick Greysteil Hore-Ruthven, widely known as Grey, was born in 1939, the elder son of Captain A.H.P. HoreRuthven, of the Rifle Brigade, and Pamela Fletcher. His father was killed in Libya in 1942, and he grew up on family estates in Ireland. He was named after a Scottish ancestor who had killed Mary Scots’s lover David Rizzio in 1566. His grandfather, who had won the Victoria Cross, served as Governor-General of Australia and was made Earl of Gowrie in 1945. When he returned to England after the War, he became Lord Lieutenant of Windsor Castle – and for a time Grey lived with him there. “We’ll have great jokes together when I come to Windsor Castle,” he had confided to Queen Mary, aged seven. He assumed the earldom aged 15, when he was still at Eton; from there, he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English, edited Isis, and for £75 acquired an early Hockney for the college art collection. On graduating, he embarked on a career teaching at universities in the US. He was the poet Robert Lowell’s assistant at Harvard, and befriended Henry Kissinger. But in the late 1960s, he decided that “the Eng Lit thing” was not for him, said The Times – and returning to England, used his seat in the House of Lords to enter politics, while training as an art dealer. Edward Heath made him a Lords whip, and opposition spokesman on economic affairs. He then became a member of Margaret Thatcher’s court. He would describe the Iron Lady as one of his best friends, along with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Francis Bacon. He worked in the Northern Ireland office under Jim Prior during the Maze hunger strikes in the early 1980s; and in 1984, Thatcher made him minister for the arts. She would have made him the education minister, had he not abruptly resigned.
After leaving Westminster politics, Gowrie joined Sotheby’s International, becoming its chairman. His salary there was reputed to be £150,000. But later he took several unpaid roles. He was chair of the Booker Prize judges in 1993, which involved the reading of 111 books; he was also chairman of the Arts Council, during a period in the mid-1990s when it was being flooded with lottery cash. Its allocation of grants has always been controversial, and Gowrie found himself having to defend a number of its choices, not least the decision to give £78m towards the rebuilding of the Royal Opera House. In 2000, after years of declining health, he underwent a heart transplant, and largely retired from public life. He is survived by his second wife, Adelheid Gräfin von der Schulenburg, and his son from his first marriage to Alexandra Bingley.