Lord Phillips of Sudbury
Straight-talking Liberal Democrat peer who warned his party against European federalism
LORD PHILLIPS OF SUDBURY, who has died aged 84, was a prominent solicitor and Liberal Democrat peer in the Victorian tradition of muscular highmindedness and earnestness of purpose.
A one-time Labour candidate, he switched to the Liberals in the mid-1970s and stood unsuccessfully in a 1977 by-election, in European elections in 1979 and in 1983 for the Alliance in the general election.
Tall and spare, with intense brown eyes and a high parting, Phillips was once described as looking like “Thomas Arnold wrestling with the souls of the porters at Rugby Station or Charles Kingsley striding his Hampshire parish to sort out the drains”. But his uncompromising honesty made him an occasionally uncomfortable political bedfellow.
He fell out with the Labour Party over his opposition to Clause IV nationalisation and his enthusiasm for Britain’s membership of the Common Market, but he was also prominent in warning the Liberal Democrats against signing up to a federal Europe without the full consent of the British people.
“We are on the point of ceding our own sovereignty,” he warned the party conference in 1990, “the keys in the night passing to Brussels. We are engaged in a form of massive escapism. We loathe Thatcherism so much we believe anything else must be better.” Mrs Thatcher, he pointed out, was “a removable feature of British politics”, but going into Europe on a false prospectus would be “irreversible and profoundly undemocratic”.
Phillips was senior partner with Bates, Wells and Braithwaite, solicitors specialising in charity law, and was a prominent advocate of widening access to legal services. He was founder-chairman of the Legal Action Group, which co-ordinates legal services for the poor. He was initiator and first president of the solicitor’s Pro Bono Group and founder and first president of the Citizenship Foundation, promoting the understanding of legal rights and civic duties among young people. He was also for many years “Legal Eagle” on Radio 2’s Jimmy Young Show.
In 1992, he was dragged unwillingly into the limelight when documents revealing a relationship between the Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown and his former secretary Patricia Howard were stolen during a break-in at Ashdown’s office near Smithfield Market. The documents were a transcript of a conversation between the Liberal leader and Phillips, acting as his solicitor, which had taken place in 1990 when Patricia Howard was getting a divorce from her husband and Ashdown feared that details of their 1986 affair might be made public.
The first that Phillips knew of the theft was when he was phoned by a News of the World reporter wanting to know whether the documents were genuine. An injunction was issued forbidding publication, but the news leaked out and Ashdown was forced to make a clean breast of things.
Despite the obvious temptations, Phillips refused to subscribe to conspiracy theories that the burglary had been politically orchestrated, describing the discovery of the documents as an “exotic freak”.
Andrew Wyndham Phillips was born on March 15 1939 and was educated at Uppingham and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read law. He qualified as a solicitor in 1964 and became a founding partner in Bates, Wells and Braithwaite in 1970.
He fought Harwich for Labour in the general election of 1970, pushing up the Labour vote by 1,500 and coming second to the Tory incumbent, Julian Ridsdale.
A few weeks after he was adopted as Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for North Norfolk in 1972, however, he made a statement enthusiastically supporting Britain’s membership of the Common Market. When he followed this up with a letter to The Times attacking the party’s commitment to nationalisation, the constituency party promptly voted to deselect him.
In 1977, by then in the Liberal Party, he was selected to fight a by-election in Saffron Walden caused by the death of the Tory MP Sir Peter Kirk. Phillips put his faith in what he called the “residue of bloodymindedness left over from East Anglian nonconformity” which had, until 1922, given the constituency Liberal MPS.
Although he fought a good fight, he suffered the fall-out of the Lib-lab pact and the sudden decision by the party hierarchy to commit itself to a wealth tax. As a result, the Tory candidate Alan Haselhurst romped to victory with a handsome majority and the Liberal share of the vote dropped by five per cent.
Phillips stood unsuccessfully again for
Saffron Walden in the general election of 1979 and for Essex North and East in the European elections the same year. He left his mark on an otherwise dull campaign by cutting a record, A Song for Europe, in which he scorned “force-fed horror stories of food mountains, insensitive bureaucracy and exploitation of the poor British”, distributing 20,000 copies of this ditty round the constituency. In 1983 he stood, again unsuccessfully, as Liberal/alliance candidate for Gainsborough and Horncastle.
During the 1980s, Phillips served as Alliance spokesman on legal affairs and chaired a Party commission on the City. In 1988 he denounced the deadly sin of avarice in a jeremiad against capitalism broadcast on Radio 4. The same year he joined with a Church of England group led by the Bishop of Oxford in threatening legal action against the financial arm of the church unless it withdrew investments linked to South Africa. During the 1990s, he served as a member of the National Lottery Charities Board.
Andrew Phillips was raised to the peerage as Lord Phillips of Sudbury in 1998. In the Upper House his campaigns included leading opposition to the identity card bill promoted by the Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett after the September 11 attacks (this eventually became the Identity Cards Act 2006, but implementation was delayed and in 2011 the coalition government scrapped it).
Phillips also fought for reform of the Lords, having been blocked from resigning his life peerage in 2006. Instead, he took a leave of absence for three years. But under the provisions of the 2014 House of Lords Reform Act, which allowed peers to resign from the House of Lords (as well as providing for the expulsion of peers convicted of serious offences) he was permitted to retire from the Lords in 2015. After that he was happy to be called simply Mr Phillips.
He married, in 1968, Penelope Bennett, an English teacher; she survives him with a son and two daughters.
Andrew Phillips, born March 15 1939, died April 9 2023