When, in 1970, Peter Thomas was appointed the first Tory Secretary of State for Wales by Edward Heath (who at the same time named him party chairman) it was apparent to him that he had not the easiest of rows to harrow. The Conservative Party was, in general, neither electorally successful nor popular in Wales, and it was immediately objected against him - and not just by radical Welsh nationalist opinion - that a man representing a well-heeled London constituency like Hendon South was hardly the most plausible incumbent of such an office.
Such objections were in fact quite unfair. Thomas’s credentials to speak for Wales were impeccable. Welsh-born, Welsh-educated and Welsh-speaking, he had represented Conway from 1951 to 1966, and it was only his being defeated there in the latter year, in the second of Harold Wilson’s electoral victories, which led him to think of a safer seat for him outside Wales.
At the tender age of 15, at school in Rhyl, he had proposed the motion that “Wales should have home rule”. In Parliament in the mid-1950s he had been in the forefront of those who had urged the creation of a separate Welsh Office. In 1958 he promoted a private member’s bill to allow local councils to fund the National Eisteddfod, which became the Eisteddfod Act. He was himself a regular attender of eisteddfodau, under the bardic name Pedr Conwy.
Nevertheless, Thomas faced a difficult time as a Tory Welsh minister. Welsh nationalism wore a more militant spirit than it had done for some years. The Welsh Language Society, Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, was embarking on a programme of civil disobedience that included attacks on English owned property and English language road signs. A liberal, civilised man, Thomas showed a willingness to listen, and by being able to meet protesters on their own linguistic ground was able to silence the most obvious of the complaints that could be made against him. Indeed, his Labour shadow, George Thomas, whom Peter Thomas had succeeded as Welsh Secretary, accused him of being too soft on the militants.
As Tory Party chairman he had come under attack from the right wing of the party for not being aggressive enough in his dealings. In a government reshuffle in April 1972 he stood down in favour of Lord Carrington.
Advertisement
With the defeat of Heath by Wilson in 1974, and the accession soon afterwards of Margaret Thatcher to the Tory party leadership, Thomas left the shadow cabinet out of loyalty to his old boss. But as time went on he came to esteem the merits of the new leader, and in the years after her election victory in 1979 gradually found himself more in harmony with the style of her administration, one of a group of former Heathites who moved to the right in those years.
Foreign affairs had always been a speciality. Made a life peer in 1987, in the Lords he continued the preoccupations of his last years in the commons as deputy chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, to speak on overseas matters.
Peter John Mitchell Thomas was born in 1920, the son of a Llanrwst solicitor. He was educated at the village school from where he went to Epworth College, Rhyl (the scene of his Welsh home rule motion, which was lost by two votes). At Jesus College, Oxford, he read law. Called up when war broke out in 1939, he served in the RAF as a bomber pilot, and was shot down over Germany in 1941. He was a PoW for the remainder of the war, using the period of enforced inactivity to continue his legal studies.
Repatriated and demobilised at the end of the war, he read for the Bar, to which he was called by the Middle Temple in 1947, and became a member of the Wales and Chester Circuit.
By that time his parliamentary career was well under way. Adopted as prospective Conservative candidate at Conway in 1950, he won the seat by 583 votes from Labour in the 1951 election which returned Churchill and the Conservatives to power.
Advertisement
He was to improve this to majorities of more than 4,000 in the next two elections which confirmed the Conservatives in power - 1955 and 1959 - and even held it comfortably when Labour returned to power under Wilson in 1964. But when Wilson went back to the electorate in 1966, to improve his parliamentary majority, it was Thomas’s turn to go down to defeat to Labour by the same sort of margin - 581 votes - that had originally won him the seat.
In that time he had served as PPS to the Solicitor-General, 1954-59; Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour, 1959-61; and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office, 1961-63, in which capacity he had accompanied the Foreign Secretary, Lord Home to Moscow to sign the Test Ban Treaty. At the Ministry of Labour, where he was under Heath, he had been associated with the abolition of the maximum wage for footballers.
Out of office after 1964, he continued as Front Bench Opposition spokesman on Foreign Affairs and Law until 1966.
Thereafter he concentrated on his career in the law, and was deputy chairman of Cheshire Quarter Sessions, 1966-70, and of Denbighshire Quarter Sessions, 1968-70, when the return of the Conservatives to power under Heath gave him further opportunities in office. One of the Government’s major acts in his period as Welsh Secretary was the reorganisation of local government in the principality paralleling that in England, but hugely reducing the number of Welsh county authorities.
Back in opposition again after 1974 he was, even after having signified his approval of the new leadership, not offered a shadow post, and when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, he held no further office. He was chairman of the Select Committee on Members’ Salaries, 1981-82, and of the Select Committee on Revision of Standing orders, 1982-83. From 1974 to 1988 he was an arbitrator at the Paris Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce.
Advertisement
In 1987 he announced his intention to retire from the Commons at the general election of that year.
Thomas married, in 1947, Frances, daughter of the theatrical producer Basil Dean. She died in 1985. Two sons also predeceased him. He is survived by two daughters.
Lord Thomas of Gwydir, Secretary of State for Wales, 1970-74, and chairman of the Conservative Party, 1970-72, was born on July 31, 1920. He died on February 4, 2008, aged 87