Sir Kenneth Stowe
Whitehall mandarin who handled a ‘dirty protest’ by IRA prisoners and the first HIV/Aids campaign
SIR KENNETH STOWE, who has died aged 88, was an accomplished and unstuffy Whitehall mandarin who was principal private secretary to three prime ministers – Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher – and permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office and the DHSS.
Rating himself a “Why don’t we?” rather than a “Why should we?” man, Ken Stowe set high standards in his departments, personally apologising after clearing for publication a departmental memo which turned out to be inaccurate, and urging civil servants to shed their distaste for the “jungle” of industry and commerce.
An administrator in the DHSS and its predecessors for most of his career, Stowe tried to talk Wilson out of appointing him his private secretary in 1975. Wilson dug his heels in, and within a year Stowe faced the stormiest passage of his career, over the outgoing premier’s controversial resignation honours list, which he was in charge of processing.
The “Lavender List” – so called because it was reputedly written on the tinted notepaper of Wilson’s volatile political secretary Marcia Williams (Lady Falkender) – provoked a furore.
Alongside such worthy candidates as the actor John Mills, it honoured the buccaneering Tory financier Jimmy Goldsmith; the property magnate Sir Eric Miller, who would commit suicide within a year while under investigation for fraud; and Joe Kagan, deviser of Wilson’s favourite Gannex raincoat, who would be jailed for fraud in 1980.
Roy Jenkins wrote that Wilson’s retirement “was disfigured by his, at best, eccentric resignation honours list which gave peerages or knighthoods to adventurous business gentlemen, several of whom were close neither to him nor to the Labour Party.” There was, however, no suggestion of financial impropriety in its composition.
To compound matters, the list was leaked to the The political village was aghast at the list’s contents, and it emerged that the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee had objected to most of the names on it.
The veteran former Labour MP Lady Summerskill, a member of the panel, said: “We were astounded when we read the list of proposed honours. We told the civil servant present that we could not approve of at least half of the list, and would he see that this was conveyed to the prime minister?”
Sir Stuart Milner-Barry, clerk to the committee, relayed its view to Stowe. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Stowe told Wilson that the committee considered the bulk of the names unacceptable. Wilson’s reaction is not recorded, but only one name was removed. His successor, James Callaghan, was only shown the list the day before publication.
Lady Edith declared herself “astonished that, with one exception, the original list of recipients was published unchanged. We were in fact faced with a fait accompli which we had no power to upset.”
Stowe’s relations with Callaghan – and, indeed, Margaret Thatcher – were smoother. One day Callaghan was tickled to receive an invitation to join the Athenaeum, the Pall Mall club to which a score of his predecessors had belonged and in whose drawing room Asquith had famously scribbled love letters to Lady Venetia Stanley. He accepted, then was disconcerted to receive a hefty bill. Putting a brave face on it, the prime minister paid up – and took Stowe there to lunch.
Kenneth Ronald Stowe was born in east London on July 17 1927, the elder son of Arthur and Emily Stowe, and grew up on the Dagenham estate. From Dagenham County High School he went to Exeter College, Oxford, of which he became an honorary Fellow in 1989.
In 1951 Stowe joined the National Assistance Board (NAB); his first job was cycling round Romford visiting applicants for money and blankets. He was seconded in 1958 to the UN Secretariat in New York. On his return he became press officer to the NAB, justifying the refusal of successive governments to pay pensions to overeighties who had been excluded from the National Insurance Act of 1948.
Stowe helped to frame the 1966 Social Security Act which united the NAB and the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance into a new department, soon merged with the Ministry of Health. From 1972 he served on the Computer Agency Council, a joint Whitehall-private sector committee advising on the development of data processing in government. In 1973 he moved to the Cabinet Office, where he prepared briefs for the Cabinet’s Legislation Committee and took the minutes.
Two years later, he succeeded Robert Armstrong as principal private secretary at No 10. He supervised the handovers from Wilson to Callaghan and from Callaghan to Mrs Thatcher, who told him: “I am a warrior.”
Promoted to run the Northern Ireland Office in October 1979, Stowe’s time at Stormont was turbulent, coinciding with the Maze prison “dirty protest” and the hunger strike which brought about the deaths of Bobby Sands and nine other Republican prisoners. But his staff excelled, Stowe saying of them: “Everyone will go a second mile. The words ‘give up’ are not part of the vocabulary here.”
In July 1981 he returned to the sprawling DHSS as permanent secretary. Stowe found himself defending the department to MPs against charges that opticians had made millions buying cheap lenses from abroad and reclaiming a higher price from the NHS; that despite a costly NHS early retirement scheme many beneficiaries were returning to their jobs; and that drug companies were “running rings” round the NHS on prices.
It was on Stowe’s watch that HIV/ Aids made its appearance, with the social services secretary Norman Fowler launching a controversially explicit public information campaign.
In 1986 Stowe collapsed in his office with a viral infection after a meeting with Fowler about frictions with the NHS management board over who should run the service. He spent much of his final year at the Cabinet Office, undertaking “special tasks” for Armstrong who was now Cabinet Secretary.
His first job after retiring in 1987 was to serve on a commission set up by President Robert Mugabe to review the public service in Zimbabwe; in 1996 he would perform the same task in South Africa for a more appreciative President Nelson Mandela.
He advised the British government, the UN Development Programme and the Commonwealth Secretariat on administrative reform, and chaired the inaugural conference in 1994 of the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management.
Stowe chaired the governmentbacked Carnegie Inquiry into the Third Age, which in 1993 called for people to work into their seventies if they chose to, with flexible pension arrangements.
When Labour returned to power in 1997, Stowe chaired the working group of the voluntary and community sector on its compact with government, and the Treasury’s group on funding voluntary sector development.
He also chaired the Institute of Cancer Research and the Thrombosis Research Institute, and was a director of the Royal Marsden NHS Trust and a trustee of Cancer Research UK, the Carnegie Trust and the Chase Children’s Hospice. He was appointed CB in 1977, CVO in 1979, KCB in 1980 and GCB in 1986.
Kenneth Stowe married Joan Cullen in 1948; she died in 1995. He is survived by their two sons and one daughter, and by his partner Judith.