Beryl Goldsmith was the only House of Commons secretary who achieved widespread political recognition in her own right. One leading journalist described her as “a very, very sophisticated political animal”.
A woman of formidably strong character and outspoken views, she invited comparison with Margaret Thatcher whom she came to adore after openly deriding her during her early years as Tory leader. It was as a result of small acts of personal kindness, to which the apparently hardbitten Goldsmith was always susceptible, that she was first drawn towards the Iron Lady’s band of devoted supporters. Firm political commitment followed. She displayed her heroine’s uncompromising style so unflinchingly that many at Westminster found her even more intimidating than Thatcher herself. “Ring up Beryl,” a fellow secretary would advise a colleague, knowing that she could answer practically any question about events in Parliament. “I wouldn’t dare,” nervous inquirers would reply.
She often recalled how her telephone rang just after Mrs Thatcher had ended her famous last speech as Prime Minster: “A national newspaper editor said, ‘Quick, give me tomorrow’s front-page headline’. Without hesitation I said (with feeling) ‘What have they done?’ ” It dominated the following day’s press.
A ferociously hard-working and resourceful assistant to a succession of Tory MPs from the 1960s onwards, she became well-known for her firm, incisive opinions on practically every issue. These she expressed with a pungency and force that few backbench MPs could surpass. Her principal public platform was the letters page of The Daily Telegraph, supplemented for a time in the 1990s by a provocative column in The Sunday Telegraph. She never retired from her desk, laden with papers, deep in the bowels of the Commons, and age did not wither either her Thatcherite convictions or her combative character.
In her final years MPs on the right of the Conservative Party, sceptical about the Cameron project, regarded her as an invaluable friend and ally, relishing her mockery of fashionable, modernising ideas. When a Telegraph journalist claimed in November 2009 that by parachuting women into safe seats David Cameron had “brought his party a long way”, she retorted scathingly, “but to where and at what cost to the traditional freedom of his local associations to select their own candidates? Discrimination, whichever way it travels, is demeaning and unacceptable”. But she was incensed when associations used their freedom to select “rich and self-indulgent” people.
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Hard work alone earned her respect. Rank never impressed her unless, as in the case of the Princess Royal, it was associated with public service of real value. Diana, Princess of Wales, was a natural target for attack. “One wonders”, Goldsmith wrote in September 1993, “whether the Princess of Wales (fresh from her luxury holiday in Bali) gives a thought to the hungry African children to whom she dispensed gruel not so long ago.” An opinion poll found that 81 per cent agreed with her criticisms. Goldsmith was always merciless in exposing hypocrisy whenever she found it.
She brought to the Tory right all the zeal of the convert. When she first became involved with the Conservative Party through the Wembley Young Conservatives, whom she chaired, enthusiasm for Europe was her principal preoccupation, fostered by Madron Seligman, who was Ted Heath’s greatest friend. Seligman drew her into Heath’s closest personal circle. She retained her place in it until the 1980s, campaigning vigorously for a “yes” vote in the 1975 referendum and helping to found the Conservative Group for Europe which she chaired from 1981 to 1985 when she was appointed OBE.
It was reported in the press in 1978 that she “wanted to go to Strasbourg” as an MEP. Her affection for Heath survived her conquest by Thatcherism. “Ted will be upset,” she would say years later on hearing some news story that represented a setback for his interests. Loyalty was always the principal feature of her character.
She gave her loyalty above all to Norman Tebbit for whom she worked from 1985 until her death. Theirs was a remarkable political partnership which helped to ease the difficulties that had weighed so heavily upon him since the Brighton bombing in 1984.
When in 2004 her 77th birthday celebrations coincided with a party given by Michael Howard, then the Conservative leader, Tebbit had no hesitation in turning down the latter. “If I stand up Beryl they’d find my dismembered body in the Thames,” he said. That was the second proudest moment of her career. The greatest had come in 2000 when Margaret Thatcher addressed a meeting which she had arranged in Windsor. “There is one reason I am here,” Thatcher began, “and that reason is Beryl Goldsmith. You don’t say no to Beryl.”
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Goldsmith was an intensely private person, who rarely spoke about her early family life, first on the outskirts of Southampton where she was born and later in London. Her parents were an unusual combination: her father a Baptist, her mother a Catholic who insisted that she attend a convent school which left her with a lifetime’s interest in the Papacy but not in religion itself.
Utterly absorbed in politics, she sometimes expressed regret that, having got on to the official Conservative candidates’ list, she had not continued to seek a parliamentary career after failing to win the nomination for a by-election in Uxbridge in 1972.
“I should have been more single-minded and become an MP myself,” she said wistfully.
As her health declined she relied increasingly on the telephone to bring her the inside political news which she always sought avidly. It seemed appropriate, Tebbit said, that his great friend died with the telephone in her hand.
She was unmarried.
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Beryl Goldsmith, OBE, parliamentary secretary, was born on July 20, 1927. She died on May 13, 2012, aged 84