Norman Macrae
Norman Macrae, who has died aged 86, was a former deputy editor of The Economist and columnist for The Sunday Times. He had a reputation as a fiercely intelligent journalist and as a remarkably prescient soothsayer. In 1984, he predicted: “Eventually books, files, television programmes, computer information and telecommunications will merge. We’ll have this portable object which is a television screen with first a typewriter, later a voice activator attached. Afterwards it will be miniaturised ... will be used to access databases anywhere in the globe, and will become the brainworker’s mobile place of work.”
There was hardly an aspect of life that was off-limits for him; through his writing he changed many minds and opened even more; most of his ideas were ahead of their time. The ability to foresee the internet and the smartphone did not automatically make him a household name, however. This was easily explained. In 1949 he joined The Economist, then as now a publication without bylines, and he did not leave it until he retired in 1988.
Despite its anonymity, The Economist was the perfect pulpit for Macrae. It allowed him to roam, geographically as well as intellectually. Several influences had helped to form him. As a boy, he had witnessed Stalin’s purges first-hand in Moscow, where his father was the British consul from 1936 to 1938. In the second world war, he had been in the RAF, which he described as a “public-sector job, with public-sector productivity”. And, having read economics at post-war Cambridge, he derided the university’s intellectual atmosphere as “sub-polytechnic Marxism”.
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Although easy to pigeon-hole as a prophet of the new right — one former colleague described him as “a Thatcherite before she was” — in truth his politics were more complicated. He was an advocate of market capitalism only in so far as it advanced individual freedom. He objected to big business as much as big government; and he was as harsh a critic of religious conservatism under Reaganism as he was of the flabby post-war consensus in Britain.
He wasn’t always entirely right. In retirement in 1989 he was hired by Andrew Neil, to whom he had been a mentor at The Economist, to write a column for The Sunday Times.
In the first, 10 months before the Berlin Wall fell, he thought communist eastern Europe would “take the Latin American road to horrid inflations, and through them back to worse military dictatorships, with the added nuisance that any Soviet Galtieri would still have intercontinental missiles and several thousand hydrogen bombs”.
And in his last, in 1996, he hoped, as he had throughout his career, for a united Ireland that would become a magnet for investment by making politics irrelevant.
— The Daily Telegraph and The Times
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Peter Walker
Lord Walker of Worcester, who died on Wednesday aged 78, was a dynamic 1970s meritocrat who, remarkably, held cabinet office under both Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher. A committed Tory “wet” who disputed Thatcherite orthodoxy, he possessed the ability and staying-power to outlast devotees of the Iron Lady who were found wanting.
The son of a Middlesex shopkeeper, Peter Walker was a man of great wit and some charm, and a born survivor. He was almost unscathed by the demise of the controversial securities firm Slater Walker, in which he had been junior partner to Jim Slater before becoming a minister. As Heath’s environment secretary he pushed through the 1974 reorganisation of English local government that abolished historic counties and created new metropolitan authorities, remarkably without permanently alienating the Tory grassroots. His popularity in the country and the House, and his relative youth, made him too dangerous to be allowed to become a focus of opposition on the back benches after Thatcher became leader. (That mantle fell eventually on Michael Heseltine.) She did not trust him enough to give him a frontline post; he served as her minister of agriculture, energy secretary (during the 1984-85 miners’ strike) and finally Welsh secretary. She did, however, value his sureness of touch, and when Walker left the cabinet — in May 1990, just six months before her own fall — it was his decision.
His son Robin was elected Tory MP for Worcester, his old seat, on May 6.
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— The Daily Telegraph
Anthony Quinton
Anthony Quinton, who has died aged 85, was the funniest philosopher since Hume and one of the fattest. He and his mother were torpedoed during the war and spent 20 hours adrift. Friends wondered if this accounted for his being “quite good at eating”. In middle age, after a walk, he spotted a village shop selling pies, cakes and fizzy drinks under the sign Quality Our Motto. “Oh dear,” Quinton said, “Quantity’s mine.”
— The Guardian