Angela Rumbold entered Parliament on a wave of Falklands euphoria and rose to the upper echelons of the Conservative Party, serving as Education Secretary at the height of the Thatcher years. She went on to serve as vice-chairman of the party during John Major’s Government.
Rumbold, who was mentored by the staunch rightwinger Nicholas Ridley, was the first governing-party candidate to win a by-election in 22 years and, as a woman in a political millieu even more male dominated than it is today, spoke out in favour of greater gender balance within politics, urging Conservative activists to do more to encourage women to come forward. As a result, she was the first woman to be put in charge of recruiting and scrutinising would-be Tory candidates.
Yet she could be as staunchly rightwing as Margaret Thatcher, refusing as race relations minister in 1990 to distance herself from Norman Tebbit’s infamous “cricket test” to establish the suitability of immigrants to live in Britain, opposing across-the-board tax concessions to help working parents and denouncing the single European currency — a view that severely undermined Major’s “wait-and-see” policy on the subject.
At the Department of Education and Science, as it then was, she was keen to reduce what she saw as the stranglehold of local councils on education, becoming a strong advcocate of grant-maintained schools.
Nevertheless, she could be a fervent defender of the state education system over which she presided. When goaded about a group of illiterate 11-year-olds who had featured on Newsnight on BBC Two, she retorted: “They must have searched really hard to find those boys . . . I probably visited more schools than anyone in this department . . . people were able to write and read even if their achievements weren’t very extended.” The difficulty, she added, was more of a social one, getting them into school in the first place.
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She was born Angela Claire Rosemary Jones, the daughter of Harry Jones, FRS, the distinguished physicist who later served as Pro-Rector of Imperial College London. Swimming was a childhood passion, and she was backstroke champion for her county.
She was educated at the Perse School for Girls and Notting Hill and Ealing High School. She read law at King’s College London, qualifying as a barrister before travelling around the US with her father. Her student politics, she later admitted, were “further right than Margaret Thatcher”.
Fleet Street beckoned, but working for Sir Edward Hulton, the publisher of Picture Post, was “just too crummy”. After undertaking the traditional Tory duties of marriage and child bearing she turned to charitable work and public service. But when she offered her sevices to the local Tories, “these amazing Tory ladies in hats” turned her down. She was campaigning for playgroups, she said in an interview with The Sunday Times in 1990, and “didn’t she realise what a disturbance playgroups caused in ‘naice’ neighbourhoods”, she recalled with a laugh. “They looked on me as a Trot and told me to rethink my ideas,”
In 1974, while serving as chief executive of the charity National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital, she was elected to Kingston Borough Council and soon her interest in politics was growing beyond playgroup campaigns. She worked for the Greater London Council and was later employed at Conservative Central Office.
In 1982 Bruce Douglas-Mann, the sitting Labour MP in Merton, Mitcham and Morden, who had a majority of only 618, defected to the recently formed SDP but, as a matter of principle, forced a by-election — held on June 3 that year.
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British Forces were at that time engaged in the South Atlantic and support for Mrs Thatcher was at an all-time high. During the campaign Rumbold made a point of asking voters their views on the subject. Labour complained that such tactics were “shameless banging on the national drum”, but Rumbold demurred. “This is the issue of the day,” she said, “and people wanted to talk about it.” So they did, giving her a majority of 4,274. She rewarded her helpers — and the press — with pots of homemade marmalade.
It was to be the last time that the Tories would gain a seat at a by-election until May 2008, when Edward Timpson won Crewe and Nantwich.
In John Major’s 1990 reshuffle Rumbold moved to the Home Office, where she was officially described as having responsibility for women’s issues — although there was more to the job than “wimmin’s matters”, she said. “Prisons are the first priority, then community relations, women, animals, electoral reform, data protection, shops, etc.” Her views on women’s place in society were pragmatic. “Women should have options”, she declared, and be able to pursue careers at the time and place of their choosing.
After the 1992 general election Rumbold — whose affiliations lay with the No Turning Back Group — was appointed vice-chairman of the party, where she was seen as as a safe pair of hands by traditionalists worried by Major’s liberal brand of Conservatism.
She did not disappoint. Despite being on the back benches she was widely regarded as a powerful voice. When, on one occasion, she declared on BBC radio, “No to more powers for Brussels”, her statement was interpreted as a powerful symbol of discord within Major’s fracturing party.
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However, she was determined to use her new position to advance the cause of women within the party and undertook what she described as “a full review” of the way that the party selected its candidates.
Rumbold retained her seat — renamed Mitcham and Morden in 1983 — until the Labour landslide of 1997, when she was defeated by Siobhain McDonagh. Thereafter she maintained her interest in voluntary work, particularly education, serving as a governor at several schools, including Wimbledon High School. Latterly she was chairman of the United Learning Trust, which sponsors 17 academies.
Despite her true blue colours, Rumbold was enamoured with new Labour’s plan for academies, which has since been extended by Michael Gove. In 2002 she said that successful education “needed . . . the ingredient that David Blunkett once said he would like to bottle — the ethos of schools to which parents strive to send their children because of the differences they engender in attitudes and behaviour”.
Thanks to her year in the US, Rumbold enjoyed a passion for the automobile, driving a white, left-hand drive Chevrolet for much of her life.
She had little time for complainers. In 1996 she wrote to an elderly constituent who had carped about MPs’ 26 per cent pay rise that year. It was “very unfair and disgusting”, she said, that voters “continue to complain to their representatives, whose time is entirely devoted to the interests of their constituents, about the recompense they receive”. Another critic, who wrote her from prison, was told that he should stay there “hopefully for quite a number of years”.
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She was appointed CBE in 1981 and advanced to DBE in 1992.
Rumbold — who was once described by friends as “no gooey-eyed lover of children and babies” — is survived by her husband, John, to whom she was married in 1958, and by two sons and a daughter.
Angela Rumbold, DBE, Conservative MP for Mitcham and Morden, 1982-97, was born on August 11, 1932. She died on June 19, 2010, aged 77