John Cockcroft
Economist at GKN, Telegraph journalist and Tory MP who was passionate about Britain in Europe
JOHN COCKCROFT, who has died aged 88, was a City economist and Daily Telegraph leader writer who cut short his career as a Conservative MP, at the election which brought Margaret Thatcher to power, because of the demands of his young family.
Strongly pro-european, Cockcroft was firmly committed to Edward Heath when first elected for Nantwich in the snap February 1974 election which Heath had disastrously called in an effort to defeat the striking miners.
Soon after, he attended a dinner at the home of Heath’s acolyte Nicholas Scott to meet the great man. Cockcroft recalled: “Heath ignored all the 10 new MPS present and left early, prompting me to say, ‘Better not produce the Leader in the flesh if you have any more of these Last Suppers.’”
Cockcroft went home disillusioned, and when Mrs Thatcher challenged Heath early in 1975 he was “captivated by [MP and Colditz hero] Airey Neave’s brilliant campaign for her”; he felt her main rival Willie Whitelaw “lacked the nerves of steel needed to sort out British industry”.
He could over time have earned a place on Mrs Thatcher’s front bench. But by the end of that year Cockcroft concluded that the parliamentary life was not for him, with two small daughters, and homes in Bedfordshire and his Cheshire constituency.
There was also talk that Cockcroft did not “see eye to eye” with his association. They lost no time in selecting the future Foreign Office minister Sir Nicholas Bonsor as his successor.
John Hoyle Cockcroft was born at Todmorden, Yorkshire, on July 6 1934, the son of Lionel Cockcroft – brother of the Nobel Prizewinning physicist Sir John Cockcroft – and the former Jenny Hoyle.
From Oundle he won a scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, going up in 1955 after National Service as a second lieutenant with the Royal Artillery. Reading history and economics, he was president of the Union in 1958.
Graduating that year, he joined the Financial Times as a feature writer and investment analyst. In 1961 he began a long association with the engineering group GKN: joining as an economist, he wrote the company’s internal history (published in 1976) and from 2002 was consultant on GKN’S archives.
Early in 1962 Cockcroft was having tea at the Commons as a guest of the editor of Hansard when Sir Winston Churchill shuffled in, leaning on a stick and accompanied by two helpers. He sat down next to Cockcroft, asked his name and told him: “Your uncle is doing very well as master of Churchill College. I always like scientists and engineers.”
Cockcroft quickly realised that Churchill, two years from the end of his Commons career, was having a “Black Dog” day: the elderly wartime leader started voicing regrets over the bombing of Dresden and the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Japan. Cockcroft assured Churchill that with Hiroshima, at least, there had been no alternative.
In 1965 GKN seconded Cockcroft to the public enterprises division of the Treasury, specialising in transport; he emerged convinced that a Tory government should attract private capital into the nationalised industries.
Then in 1967 he joined the Telegraph, from where he critiqued the efforts of Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Roy Jenkins to turn the economy round. He also reported from newly independent countries across Africa.
Heath’s drive to take Britain into Europe struck a strong chord with Cockcroft; in Why England Sleeps (1971) he voiced the fear that Parliament might approve membership by too slim a majority to carry conviction, and he hailed the following year’s decisive vote as “historic”. In 1973 he became a council member of the European Movement.
Cockcroft was short-listed to take on Jeremy Thorpe in North Devon, then in 1973 was selected for Nantwich from 111 applicants to succeed Sir Robert Grant-ferris. When Heath called the election, Cockcroft held the seat with an almost unchanged majority of 5,168, despite a national swing to Labour. That October the margin narrowed to 3,374.
Appointed to the Nationalised Industries Select Committee, he got on unexpectedly well with its Labour chairman, the Aussie Bomber Command veteran Russell Kerr. This earned him a ticking-off from the whips.
Cockcroft became concerned that MPS’ allowances were becoming larger than their salaries and could become a cause for scandal, as they would eventually when in 2009 the Telegraph exposed the heroic nature of some claims.
He asked Neave for a meeting with Mrs Thatcher, at which he warned her there could be an “enormous row”. Unfortunately for Cockcroft, she completely missed the point, telling him: “John, I have always lived on my parliamentary salary, and so should you.”
As he prepared to leave the House, Cockcroft took up numerous consultancies. One, for British Rail, led in 1984 to his being appointed to BR’S Eastern Region board. He joined the stockbrokers Duff Stoop in 1978, moving in 1986 to Laurence, Prust, wrote leaders and occasional pieces on banking for The Sunday Telegraph, and was a regular contributor to Order! Order!, the journal for former MPS.
From 1990 to 2006 he was a director of International Conflict Resolution, working up proposals with Paul Stonor for Shield, a standing UN military intervention force.
John Cockcroft married, in 1971, Tessa Shepley; they had three daughters.
John Cockcroft, born July 6 1934, died April 25 2023