Until his retirement this year at the age of 93, Lord Denham was the longest-serving peer, having sat in the upper house since 1949. Such was his longevity, that he was also the last man alive to have served in Harold Macmillan’s government. He was not one for hogging the debates, though. The last time he spoke in parliament was six years ago, and that was to tell off another peer for droning on too long.
Denham’s long silence in recent years echoed the start of his political career. He waited six years before his maiden speech, in which, perhaps surprisingly, he opposed a ban on heroin. If this might have seemed quite a progressive, even libertarian, position for a Tory peer to hold, he countered it with his views on baronesses, warning in 1957 that women should not become peers because “the atmosphere will be altered, possibly for the worse”.
The agreeable vein of eccentricity in his personality might have made him seem like a character from PG Wodehouse, especially as he was universally known as Bertie and had a penchant for snuff, but the mischievous Nancy Mitford would have been closer to the mark, not least because she was his first cousin and he was much given to quoting her.
Unlike many peers, Denham had no country estate or business to manage, only a small village shop. This meant he was able to spend a great deal of time in the House of Lords, relishing all aspects of its traditions and procedures, of which he was a staunch guardian. Changes that seriously affronted constitutional practice caused him considerable anguish. In particular, he deplored the removal of the vast majority of the hereditary peers by Tony Blair in 1999. He himself was one of the 92 hereditaries who stayed on. The House responded to this champion of its customs and heritage by making clear its affection for him across party lines. It even seemed to regard him as its resident “character”.
Uninterested in striving for departmental office and a cabinet seat, Denham achieved the summit of his ambition under Margaret Thatcher. Appointed Lords chief whip in 1979, he was her only senior colleague to keep the same post throughout her 11-year premiership. On one occasion, when she struggled to win a vote in the Lords, she summoned him and gave him a savaging for not securing the votes. “Prime minister,” Denham retorted, “even you should know better than to expect me to find you a majority during [Cheltenham] Gold Cup week.”
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Sir Bertram Stanley Mitford Bowyer Bt, was born in 1927 in Weston Underwood, Buckinghamshire. He succeeded as 2nd Baron Denham in 1948 on the death of his father, a long-serving Conservative MP and junior minister whose peerage had been preceded by a baronetcy to which Bertie Denham added a second, inherited from a kinsman. His mother was the Hon Daphne Freeman-Mitford, daughter of the first Baron Redesdale.
He was educated at Eton where he was a King’s Scholar, and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he read English literature. After the end of the Second World War, in 1945, he served briefly in the Grenadier Guards and subsequently as a lieutenant in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry between 1946 and 1948 as part of his National Service.
In 1956 he married Jean, daughter of Major Kenneth McCorquodale and sister of Alastair McCorquodale, who represented Britain at the 1948 Olympic Games. They had four children: Jocelyn, a physiotherapist; Richard, a teacher, who becomes the 3rd Baron Denham; Harry, a barrister; and George, a chartered surveyor.
At the start of his career the Tories relied almost entirely on young hereditary peers to do most of their frontbench work in the Lords. Denham received his party’s summons at the age of 34. In 1961, six years after his pro-heroin maiden speech, he was made a lord in waiting, one of a group of three junior whips on whom the main burden of expounding the benefits of Tory legislation fell.
He remained a member of the group, in government and in opposition, growing steadily in prominence until the Edward Heath years in the early 1970s, when he became deputy chief whip, an appointment that carried with it the ancient sinecure post of Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard complete with a fine, elaborate uniform and a black silk cocked hat which he wore with aplomb. Another sinecure post accompanied the job, the captaincy of the Gentlemen-at-Arms, the monarch’s “nearest guard”, and he duly acquired another resplendent uniform, this time with a plumed helmet that he found rather cumbersome.
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During the Thatcher years he worked with six different leaders of the House, not all of them personally congenial to him, as part of the duopoly that has always had charge of the business of the Lords in conjunction with its senior officials. His was the role that mattered above all to Thatcher. On him depended the progress of her government’s legislation through the upper house. Since much of that legislation was controversial and unpopular among Tory peers, political skill was required, and Denham possessed it in abundance. He was invaluable to her and later confessed to feeling a little hurt that she had made no reference to him or to his efforts on her behalf when she came to write her memoirs.
That reflected in part their lack of common interests. He was a countryman to the core, in love with the traditional pursuits and sports of rural England, which he turned to good effect in writing the four enjoyable thrillers that he published between 1979 and 1997. Thatcher was bored by the countryside, and the only thrillers she read were by Dick Francis.
Even at times of great political crisis Denham was often to be found in his office, calmly typing one of his novels on a portable Remington. All four have as their chief protagonist a decent, if lustful, Lords whip, Viscount Thyrde (pronounced third), but his character lacks interest and depth. The books deal far more satisfactorily with events and places, such as White’s club and country houses, than with people. There is, however, a fine vignette of the author. At one point Thyrde calls on his chief whip. “I found him sitting down, his lank form drooped over his desk, engaged in a rhythmic transfer of papers from his in-tray to his out, with only the formality of adding a ritual and hieroglyphic initial to each, as it passed in between.” This was how Denham treated his own papers, to his private secretary’s despair.
As well as not reading his novels, Thatcher also failed to appreciate the extent of the difficulties Denham faced in the Lords. Defeats, in some number, could not be avoided. The task that Denham set himself was to ensure that the government’s principal measures passed the Lords without being emasculated by hostile amendments. Sometimes that meant keeping recalcitrant peers away from the House.
One June, a tight vote was anticipated. Thatcher spoke to Denham about it on the telephone. He told her he was at Ascot with a group of Tory peers. “But of course you will all be back tomorrow in good time for the division.” “No, prime minister,” he replied, “I am keeping them down here so they cannot vote against the government.”
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At other times the avoidance of defeat involved bringing in those rarely seen in the Lords, the backwoodsmen. He enticed them with the prospect of alcohol from his abundant supplies, which always included the finest whisky and brandy. The Cabinet Office once queried a monthly drinks bill of £400. “I have saved the government £40 million by getting its legislation through,” he replied loftily.
In 1984 he got a much-disliked bill paving the way for the abolition of the Greater London Council through by 237 to 217, the largest turnout since the vote to join the EEC. Over the poll tax in 1988, he exerted his guile to secure the biggest attendance since the Lloyd George budget of 1909. The second reading was carried by 317 to 183. He thought it best if peers avoided listening to the speeches made in the chamber. “If you listen to the arguments, you should vote with your conscience,” he was fond of saying. “ If you have not listened to them, you should vote with the government.”
Willie Whitelaw saw much of all this at first hand when he was leader of the Lords from 1983 to 1988. In his memoirs he paid tribute to the special skills that so often proved the government’s salvation. Denham, he wrote, “must have been specially made for the job” of chief whip . . . He has an unerring instinct for the moods of the House and the likely attitude of its members day by day. What is more, he hides all these qualities and an extremely acute brain under a cloak of natural charm and a splendid sense of humour.”
The humour was not always evident in Whitelaw’s own case. According to one observer, “if Willie was making a mess of things, Bertie moved out to the middle of the chamber and glared at him until he shut up and sat down”.
Sensing after Thatcher’s resignation that his own days in office were numbered, Denham took the unprecedented step of announcing his departure some months in advance — and duly stepped down on May 22, 1991, chosen to avoid dismissal. Shortly afterwards he was appointed KBE.
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He did not lose his love of uniforms. Invited to open the debate at the start of a new parliamentary session, he addressed the House in the scarlet full-dress uniform of a sergeant of the Honourable Artillery Company with three large chevrons on his sleeves. This was the last time a peer spoke in the House wearing uniform.
One of his favourite party pieces was to recite well-known poems such as Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol to appreciative private audiences. After his retirement, three CDs were produced, with Joanna Lumley assisting in an advisory capacity. In his self-effacing way he described them as “moderately successful”.
Lord Denham, KBE, Conservative politician and author, was born on October 3, 1927. He died at home on December 1, 2021, aged 94