Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Resistance fighter who became MP in West
SIR Dennis Walters, who has died aged 92, served as Conservative MP for Westbury from 1964 to 1992.
The son of Douglas L. Walters and Clara Walters (née Pomello), Walters was of English and Italian descent.
At the outbreak of the Second World War he was in Italy and was interned, but after the Armistice of 1943 he was released and served for 11 months with the Italian Resistance.
He then returned to England and was educated at Downside School in Somerset and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he read Modern Languages as an Exhibitioner and completed an MA.
He fought unsuccessfully for the seat of Blyth in 1959 but was selected as his party’s candidate for the Conservative-held safe seat of Westbury in 1962, winning in 1964.
Wikipedia says: “Following the Six-Day War of 1967, Walters visited Palestine with his parliamentary colleague Ian Gilmour, and in a joint statement they said, ‘The Israeli attitude to the refugees becomes clearer when their return rather than their expulsion is considered. Most people in Britain probably believe that Israel has agreed to their return and that repatriation is now satisfactorily proceeding. Nothing could be further from the truth’.
“This was an early signal of the willingness of Walters and Gilmour to work closely together to explain the Arab point of view to the Western world, and they became close allies.
“Outside parliament, Walters served as Chairman of Middle East International, founded in 1971 with ‘a mission to provide authoritative and independent news and analysis on the Middle East’.
“A sympathiser with Arab interests, from 1970 to 1982 he was Chairman of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding and from 1978 to 1981 joint Chairman of the Euro-Arab Parliamentary Association.
“When the Conservatives returned to government in 1979, Walters’s well-known pro-Arabism cost him the chance of advancement as a Foreign Office minister, the area in which his hopes lay, as in the shape of Gilmour, Margaret Thatcher was willing to appoint one pro-Arab colleague, but not two.”
In 1960, Walters was appointed MBE for political services. He was knighted in 1988.
Walters was married three times.