Sir Roger Scruton

Philosopher

SIR ROGER Scruton, who has died at 75, was one of the country’s most prominent and controversial conservative philosophers.

The author of some 50 books on morals, politics, architecture and aesthetics, he was knighted in 2016 and received honours from Poland and Hungary for his work supporting dissidents behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

Last year he made headlines after he was dismissed as a Government housing tsar, advising on improving modern architecture, over a row about comments he made in a New Statesman interview.

He was reported as saying the Chinese were “creating robots of their own people”, and also referred to a “Soros empire” in Hungary – a reference to the Jewish billionaire George Soros. But the magazine did not include the rest of his statement that “it’s not necessarily an empire of Jews; that’s such nonsense”.

Repeating his claim that Islamophobia was a propaganda word “invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue”, the magazine admitted that his views had not been “accurately represented” on social media, and later clarified that his criticism of China was of the restrictive regime of the Communist Party rather than the citizens.

Sir Roger also received an apology from the then-Housing Secretary, James Brokenshire, who wrote that he regretted dismissing him over what was a “clearly partial report of your thoughts”.

Sir Roger said the row betrayed a “witch hunt” against those on the political right.

Last month, he wrote in The Spectator: “During this year much was taken from me – my reputation, my standing as a public intellectual, my position in the conservative movement, my peace of mind, my health.

“Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised

to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen.” Born in Buslingthorpe, near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, in February 1944, Sir Roger graduated from Cambridge in 1965 and specialised in aesthetics, architecture and music in his philosophical work. From 1971 he taught philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, where he said the only other conservative was the lady who served meals in the senior common room. In 1974, along with Hugh Fraser, Jonathan Aitken and John Casey, he became a founding member of the Conservative Philosophy Group dining club, which aimed

to develop an intellectual basis for conservatism. Margaret Thatcher was said to have attended meetings.

In 1982, Sir Roger became founding editor of The Salisbury Review, a journal championing traditional conservatism rather than Thatcherism. It was a post which he said effectively ended his academic career. It was the Review which in 1984 published a controversial article by a Bradford headteacher named Ray Honeyford, which questioned the benefits of multicultural education. In the ensuing controversy, Mr Honeyford became a national figure but was forced to leave his job and to surrender for a time to police protection.

Sir Roger married twice, first to Danielle Laffitte in 1973, and to Sophie Jeffreys in 1996. She survives him, with his two children.