Lord Carrington, Churchill’s last surviving minister, dies
Lord Carrington, the House of Lords member who served six U.K. prime ministers and was the last surviving member of Winston Churchill’s administration, has died. He was 99.
The House of Lords website said he died on Monday.
Carrington became one of the Conservative Party’s most influential policymakers through the 1970s and 1980s after beginning his political career as a junior agriculture minister in Churchill’s government in 1951. Best known as Margaret Thatcher’s foreign secretary from 1979 to 1982, he later headed NATO for four years as the Cold War drew to a close.
“Patience, consistency, knowledge, and if you want to be successful in the end, a great big slice of luck,” Carrington said of the requirements for successful diplomacy in a 1984 interview with University of California Television.
After holding posts in the Conservative governments of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, Carrington became defense secretary under Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1970 and briefly held the newly created post of energy secretary to counter the supply challenges caused by the 1973 oil crisis.
As foreign secretary, the former World War II army major oversaw the 1979 Lancaster House agreement that led to Rhodesian independence, ushering in Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s first prime minister. Carrington was also considered the last U.K. minister to resign honorably after taking responsibility for the nation’s failure to foresee Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982.
“If a person says to me ‘it’s a matter of honor and I feel I should go,’ that’s the one ground on which I am not at liberty to refuse,” Thatcher said of his resignation in a 1982 interview with the U.K.’s Independent Television News. “He’s been a marvelous foreign secretary. I’ve been with him on so many occasions. He’s a sturdy and bonny fighter for Britain, a very gallant officer and we shall miss him.”
As a Conservative who nurtured ties with working-class Britons, Carrington was known to have a frosty relationship with Thatcher, who took on the nation’s unions in her first term as prime minister. The former foreign secretary, who later in life named his dogs after the British leaders he had worked for, said the differences of opinion with Thatcher didn’t affect their ability to work together on world affairs.
“It may be a defect in my temperament that I find it much more natural to like than dislike people I work with or for,” he said in his 1988 memoir, “Reflect on Things Past.” “I may be irritated by characteristics but I generally sympathize with perceived difficulties and challenges.”
Peter Alexander Rupert Carington was born June 6, 1919, in Aylesbury, a town in the English county of Buckinghamshire. The spelling of his family surname differed from his House of Lords title. He became 6th Baron Carrington of Upton in 1938.
His father, Rupert Victor John Carington, was the 5th Baron Carrington and his mother, Sibyl Marion Colville, was the daughter of the 2nd Viscount Colville. The Carington family was part of a dynasty of bankers and land owners who produced several Conservative politicians.
Carrington attended Eton College in Windsor, Berkshire, and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, before serving in the Grenadier Guards during World War II. He was awarded the Military Cross in 1945 after capturing a bridge in the Dutch city of Nijmegen.