Rod Richards
Colourful MP who led the Welsh Tories but whose career was derailed by his turbulent private life
ROD RICHARDS, who has died of cancer aged 72, was the colourful, combative former Conservative MP for Clwyd North West who became a casualty of John Major’s zero tolerance approach to ministerial sleaze when he was forced to resign as a junior minister in 1996 after newspaper revelations of an affair with a young public relations officer.
After losing his seat in the Labour landslide of 1997, the following year, despite having been a leading antidevolution campaigner, he became the first person to be selected by any political party to fight the inaugural 1999 Welsh National Assembly elections, for his old parliamentary seat.
Though he lost to Labour, he was elected to the new body as lead candidate on the Conservatives’ regional top-up list and was subsequently chosen to lead the party in Cardiff Bay in a ballot of Welsh party members, defeating William Hague’s protégé Nick Bourne.
Six months later, however, he was forced to stand down as Tory leader after being charged with causing grievous bodily harm to a woman he had met in a London pub.
Though he was acquitted of the charge, in September 2002 Richards was forced to resign from the Assembly on health grounds and subsequently admitted to a longrunning problem with alcohol. In 2003 he was declared bankrupt.
An undeniably able and talented man, Richards, a former television presenter, could be charming and witty when he wanted, but could also be vicious and unforgiving with his opponents, including members of his own party. Once described as being “as abrasive as sandpaper”, he was said to rejoice in the sobriquet “the Rottweiler”.
His political career had began quietly enough in 1990 when he was selected to replace Sir Anthony Meyer, the Tory rebel who had been deselected by Clwyd North West Conservatives after standing against Mrs Thatcher as “stalking horse” candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1989.
After Richards won the seat at the 1992 general election with a 6,050 majority, a post-election survey of the new intake by The House magazine quoted him as naming the chief whip, Richard Ryder, as his political hero and “tea in the whips’ office” as his greatest ambition.
As one of the few Welsh speakers in the House Richards was clearly destined for ministerial office, and in July 1994, after a short stint as a PPS at the Foreign Office, he was appointed parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Welsh Office by John Major.
By this time Richards had begun to demonstrate the outspoken, rebarbative style that would earn him the reputation, in Labour circles and beyond, of being “the most hated man in Wales”.
In June 1994 he had been
reprimanded and forced by the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd, to withdraw a claim that Peter Hain, Labour MP for Neath, was a liar. He was later made to apologise to both Hain and Betty Boothroyd.
Shortly after his appointment to the Welsh Office, where he took responsibility for the NHS, he gave an interview to a Welsh language magazine in which he described Labour councillors in the Principality as “short, fat, slimy and fundamentally corrupt”, adding that the people of the Valleys had “no sense of self-worth” and that the Welsh suffered from an “inferiority complex”.
One Labour councillor responded: “That’s not true. I am not short”, but others did not see the funny side, and there were calls for Richards to be sacked. His boss, the Secretary of State for Wales, John Redwood, was trying to build bridges with Labour local government and forced Richards to apologise.
Nemesis was not long in coming. In June 1996 News of the World published lurid revelations about an extramarital affair with Julia Felthouse, the 28-year-old head of public relations at the National Canine Defence League. Less than 24 hours later Richards, a 49-year-old married father of three who had spearheaded a campaign on family values in Wales, became the sixth Conservative minister since the 1992 election to quit John Major’s administration over a sex scandal.
Roderick Richards was born in Llanelli on March 12 1947 to Ivor Richards and Lizzie (née Evans). From Llandovery College he went up to Aberystwyth University, but parted company following a year in which he devoted more time to sport than to books.
After a short service commission in the Royal Marines he returned to university in 1974, this time to University College of Swansea, where he graduated with a First in Economics.
He then worked briefly as an economic forecaster before joining the Ministry of Defence’s intelligence staff for eight years. Then, after a period as a mini cab driver in London, in 1983 he became a newsreader for the new S4C Welsh language channel and began to nurture political ambitions.
He contested Carmarthen for the Tories in 1987, then fought and lost the Vale of Glamorgan by-election in 1989. He served as a member of the Welsh Consumer Council from 1986 to 1989 and of the Development Board for Rural Wales from 1987 to 1989.
Richards had had to relinquish his job with S4C to fight the byelection and subsequently he became a pub landlord, borrowing money from Whitbread to refurbish the Ynyscedwyn Arms Hotel at Ystradgynlais in the Swansea Valley – a business venture that would cause financial problems later on. For a short time he served as the special adviser to the Welsh Secretary, David Hunt, but in 1990 he was selected to stand for Clwyd North West.
His resignation from the government in 1996 led to calls by some members of his constituency party to have him deselected. He survived, and when, following boundary changes, his constituency was replaced by Clwyd West and Vale of Clwyd, he fought the former, but lost to Labour in the 1997 landslide.
Ironically, for an arch-opponent of devolution, the new Welsh Assembly proved Richards’s political salvation, albeit short-lived. Against all expectations he won a place in the new body and was elected leader of the Welsh Tory group in a one-memberone-vote ballot after a bitter contest with Nick Bourne, the chief Tory spokesman in Wales who had led the unsuccessful “Just Say NO” campaign against devolution during the 1997 referendum, and with whom Richards had a famously fractious relationship.
His second spell in the public eye came to an abrupt end when he resigned as the Assembly’s Tory leader after being arrested on July 27 1999 after a night out with two women, complete strangers whom he had met in a west London pub – a night which ended in claims by the girls that he had smoked cannabis, punched one girl in the face and made sexual advances.
In December 1999 he found himself in court in Kingston, London, pleading not guilty to a charge of assault. He was eventually acquitted, but only after his reputation had taken yet another hammering. Days after the verdict in 2000, Richards’s wife, Liz, a widely respected speech therapist and psychologist who had stood by him loyally when his affair with Julia Felthouse became public, announced she was leaving him.
Meanwhile, Nick Bourne (the “mealy-mouthed mouthpiece” of William Hague, according to Richards) had replaced him as Tory leader in the Welsh Assembly. The relationship between the two men deteriorated further in February 2000 when the Whip was withdrawn from Richards for failing to vote with the Conservative group on the Assembly’s budget – after angry exchanges in which he accused Bourne of acting like “a complete prat”.
Subsequently Richards served as an “Independent Conservative” before standing down from the Assembly on health grounds after he was found by a passer-by lying in a park in Cardiff following a drinking bout and taken to hospital. The Welsh Conservatives subsequently rejected his bid to become a candidate for the Assembly elections of 2003.
By the time they took place, Richards was unemployed, bankrupt and facing a divorce.
In interviews Richards admitted that his weaknesses for alcohol and women had “screwed up” his political career, his drink problem having led to several spells in rehab.
“Imagine being elected an MP,” he admitted. “Parliament is a body where there are more drunks per square foot than anywhere else in the world. You don’t have to put your hand in your pocket. People are chucking drink down you and you have a car outside with a driver, paid for by the taxpayer, who’s going to take you home. That’s wonderful for an alcoholic.”
But, he went on, “I don’t regard my life as being sleazy. I’m a normal human being. I am open to all the pressures of life which other people, in other professions, are subject to.”
When, in 2003, he was declared bankrupt with debts of more than £300,000 arising from his pub venture, Richards blamed “the unacceptable face of capitalism” for his downfall, claiming he had rejected a deal with Whitbread under which his debt would have been written off in return for his quitting politics.
In 2013 Richards announced he was joining Ukip, but his hopes of being selected as a candidate for the European Parliament proved in vain.
“It’s not for me to decide whether I am a failure or not,” Richards told an interviewer in 2003. “Other people can decide that. But if I didn’t have three children, I’d have topped myself years ago.”
He is survived by two sons and a daughter.
Rod Richards, born March 12 1947, died July 13 2019