Lord Biffen
Minister under Margaret Thatcher considered the finest Leader of the Commons of the 20th century
Published: 15 August 2007
William John Biffen, politician: born Bridgwater, Somerset 3 November 1930; MP (Conservative) for Oswestry 1961-83, for Shropshire North 1983-97; Chief Secretary to the Treasury 1979-81; PC 1979; Secretary of State for Trade 1981-82; Lord President of the Council 1982-83; Leader of the House of Commons 1982-87; Lord Privy Seal 1983-87; created 1997 Baron Biffen; married 1979 Sarah Wood (née Drew; one stepson, one stepdaughter); died Shrewsbury 14 August 2007.
Four times - when in opposition before 1970, when in government after 1970, and after the general election defeats of February and October 1974 - Edward Heath offered John Biffen positions on the Conservative front bench. (The 1974 offers were almost desperate in their urgency, for Heath's power was now crumbling, and he was striving to neutralise his critics.) Each time Biffen refused; he differed sharply from Heath on certain major items of policy, notably the management of the economy and the matter of British entry into the EEC and he felt, therefore, that he could not honourably serve.
His attitude excited amazement among most of his fellow Tories, but it also excited a respect that grew steadily over the years.
Yet, unlike his close friend and mentor Enoch Powell, Biffen had nothing about him of the obvious characteristics of the rebel. His demeanour was quiet and his voice soft, never quite losing its native Somerset burr. When, during the five years he spent as Leader of the House of Commons his intelligence, articulacy and humour became familiar to a wide audience, it was noted that his jokes - almost invariably laced with irony - were gentle, never, in an increasingly savage political age, ad hominem.
William John Biffen was born in Somerset in 1930. His father, Victor, was a farmer at Combwich and his mother, Sarah, the daughter of a businessman prominent in Conservative politics. John, however, hated farming. Though he did his father's farm accounts from early manhood until the latter's death, when the farm was sold, he signalled his distaste for agriculture by selling off the substantial acreage attached to the property he bought in Shropshire when he became a Member of Parliament for Oswestry in 1961. His fundamental interests were economics and politics.
Young John was educated at grammar school, Dr Morgan's School in Bridgwater, and proceeded to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read History. He took a good degree, and demonstrated his political interests by becoming Vice-Chairman of the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations.
Upon graduation Biffen went to work for Tube Investments, thus beginning an interesting - and highly typical - career of combined business and political work. He came to the conclusion that businessmen did not understand politics, and that politicians did not understand business and began to produce for Tube each quarter papers projecting both economic and political developments dealt with in tandem. These papers, written in the limpid prose of which he was master, were to be found invaluable by various companies for which he worked over the years.
Many Conservative politicians were criticised in the 1990s for supposedly improper involvement in the world of business, but Biffen's business concerns, it is interesting to note, were never made the subject of attacks on either side of the House of Commons. He never received payment in brown envelopes. His movement between the worlds of commerce and politics was always clear to the world; and his probity was above question.
But Biffen was ever the individualist. When politically ambitious young men of his generation were visiting the United States, or France, or Germany, or the Soviet Union, Biffen took a month off to go to Albania. I once asked him the reason for this bizarre choice. He gave his subdued chuckle, showing his slightly wolf-like teeth and said: "Because nobody else was going there." He then showed me a yellow cutting from the Birmingham Post (he was then based in Birmingham). "This is the most gratifying headline I have ever had," he said. It read "Birmingham Tory Pierces Iron Curtain". "It seemed," he added, "that I'd gone to war all by myself."
Conservative constituency parties do not normally care (and particularly did not when Biffen was a young man) for bachelor candidates. None the less, in 1961 Biffen won the nomination for the safe seat of Oswestry (later to be transmuted into Shropshire North).
Conservative Central Office was a trifle bemused by this success on the part of a rather reclusive intellectual in a rural, no-nonsense, heartland. Years later, when I was in Shropshire to speak at Biffen's annual constituency dinner, I was given the reason for choosing him by the late Mrs Bridget O'Reilly. O'Reilly, at the time of Biffen's selection chairman of the constituency women's committee and a power in the land, was greatly taken by young Biffen. She pointed out to the other members of her committee how many unmarried young Tory ladies there were around, and suggested that at least one of them might find a husband if a bachelor was selected. The women's committee vote for Biffen was unanimous.
Alas for hopes: Biffen did not marry until 1979, and then he chose Sarah Drew, a Londoner, divorced, and with two children. Biffen was always capable of the unexpected.
He was not, however, to go places quickly, having turned Heath's offers of advancement down. It was not until 1975, following the two general election defeats of 1974, and the succession of Margaret Thatcher the following year, that he came to the front bench. Rebuked by Powell on assuming the post of Shadow Secretary of State for Energy for his failure to hold to the principle of opposition to membership of the EEC, Biffen replied that membership being now a fact, he saw no point in continuing to campaign against it. Moreover, Thatcher's domestic policies were very much his own. He had voted for her in the leadership contest, and was happy to serve under her.
Not long afterwards fate took a hand. Biffen had never been the most physically energetic of men. He had thus scarcely noticed an onset of periods of unusual lethargy. When, however, his work began to be affected by bouts of dizziness and an alarming inability to concentrate, and when his doctors confessed themselves puzzled about the cause of his condition, he felt obliged to resign from the front bench.
Very few people were allowed to know the reasons for this resignation, and stories circulated to the effect that he had lost confidence in the leader of the party. These stories were damaging to Margaret Thatcher at a time when her position seemed precarious. Knowing the reason for his departure, however, she loyally kept silence, out of respect for his desire for privacy.
By the time of his marriage in 1979, however, the hitherto puzzled doctors had found the answer - a minor blood disorder which affected his nervous system. The period following his resignation proved, therefore, to have been merely a hiccup in his career for, following the Conservative victory in June, the Prime Minister made him Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
The Chief Secretary sits in the Cabinet, but only as deputy to the Chancellor. He has the thankless task of scrutinising and reducing the budgetary claims of his spending colleagues. The early years of the first Thatcher government were grim, and Biffen was judged not to have performed particularly well in this post for, though a man of strong and deeply felt opinions, he was over-prone to see all sides of a difficult question. Thus, in January 1981 he was made Secretary of State for Trade and was immediately plunged into controversy when he ruled that the transfer of The Times to Rupert Murdoch's ownership would not be referred to the Monopolies Commission. Here, though he performed competently enough, he was unhappy, and sometimes ineffective, at running a large and complex department.
But the golden period was yet to come. In 1982, Biffen was moved from Trade to become Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons. It was the perfect job for him. The Commons Leader occupies a somewhat anomalous place in politics. A party politician, he is responsible, none the less, to the whole House, and obliged to negotiate the details of its business, and its timetable, with the opposition. Each Thursday he takes questions from MPs, and responds as he thinks fit to requests for the allocation of parliamentary time. Biffen was - to put it quite simply - the finest Commons Leader in the 20th century. (The competition in making such an assessment was strong, for William Whitelaw had been a very successful Leader).
In a period of rancorous debate in British politics Biffen won support and admiration from all quarters of the House of Commons - even Dennis Skinner was heard to voice praise of him. His total mastery of Commons affairs (later to be expressed in his invaluable book Inside the House of Commons, 1989, which should be required reading for every student of British politics and, indeed, every aspiring politician), his dry wit every Thursday afternoon, the regard in which he was held by ministerial colleagues, which enabled him to exercise a powerful influence on the organisation of parliamentary business, and his close relationship with the Prime Minister - all these factors made it possible to think of him as a future Prime Minister.
Then, all suddenly turned to dust. In a television interview shortly before the 1987 general election Biffen said that the Government should foreclose on its radicalism, enter a period of consolidating its gains, and consider its leadership to be collective, rather than residing solely in one formidable personality. "I owe her everything," he told me some time earlier, when I was talking to him about a book I was writing on Margaret Thatcher. "Without her I would never have held this wonderful job."
The consequences of the interview, however, showed that she did not feel she owed him anything. Only a few days afterwards, Bernard Ingham, her press secretary, famously described Biffen as a "semi-detached" member of the Government. After the Tory victory in the 1987 general election, he was dismissed to the back benches. A luminous mind was ousted from the inner circles of government; the workings of the House of Commons were thrown into something approaching disrepair; and even admirers of the Prime Minister concluded that she had demeaned herself. It was a sad business.
A moderate amount of consolation was, however, made available by John Major in 1997. Biffen, secure in the support of his Shropshire constituents, had, nevertheless, decided to leave the House of Commons, believing, as he put it, that "it's better to go a minute early than to stay on an hour too late". The then Prime Minister promptly put him forward for a peerage.
In many ways the House of Lords would have been a better - and certainly more decorous - stage for the display of Biffen's talents than the raucous modern House of Commons; but time did not allow for the full deployment of his gifts in the upper house.
John Biffen was unique among modern British politicians. His manner was invariably understated, but he was capable, when he chose, of powerful oratory. He was slow to anger, but his anger could be fierce. That ambiguous artefact, the unwritten British constitution, was his greatest love, and he would defend it against all comers. He understood it better than most, and we are fortunate to have, in his writing, the most elegant of defences of its working.
Patrick Cosgrave
Only part of the reason why the House of Commons loved John Biffen as its Leader was his delicious sense of humour, writes Tam Dalyell. I am biased in favour of him, I have to declare, since he was one of my best undergraduate friends. But another part of the reason for the respect he attracted among colleagues of all persuasions was that he actually set about doing something about Commons facilities.
This was no new topic for him. As a young MP in the sweaty July of 1967 he appeared on the same radio programme as I did and I have never forgotten what he said to the interviewer Andrew Alexander:
What are the facilities available for the Westminster nightshift? I must tell you they are miserably limited. The House of Commons is a royal palace. This has its advantages. We are excused the licensing laws and, like the late-lamented Windmill Theatre, the smoking room never closed. On the other hand, the royal palace status has its disadvantages; the playing of card games is excluded; the possibility of leisurely hours at the bridge table is not for the hapless all-night Member. He has three choices: drink, sleep, or debate.
On the whole Members did not drink during all-night sittings; their presence was not necessary for debate; what they had to be there for was when a vote was called. Where then could they sleep? There was nowhere obvious:
Ministers are entitled to have a private office in the House and are prudently provided with a chaise-longue - their fitful slumber is only interrupted by the division bell. One memorable recollection I have of a past week was a junior minister obviously wearing pyjamas under his hastily donned jacket and trousers. I know of no rule of order which would have prevented him voting in his dressing-gown, but the House has its standards.
However, what of the rest of us not privileged to have a ministerial chaise-longue? We do the best we can, improvising in the large green leather chairs in the library, or the settees in the Interview Room. It is a sad and sorry spectacle, the recumbent Members fatigued with long hours of parliamentary service, faces troubled with a five o'clock shadow that has lengthened through the night - and there is the snoring: Westminster's own dawn chorus.
Years later, when as Leader of the House of Commons he had the power to do something about this situation, particularly to help attendants, clerks and catering workers, Biffen used his opportunity.
So often when they have the power to do so, ministers fail to act in the spirit of what they previously said. The fact that parliamentary life has become more sensible is due in no small measure to the fact that John Biffen was able to stick out against cabinet colleagues.
When I spoke to him at the end of last year, Biffen told me that "when Brown takes over from Blair, I hope that he will restore the place of the Chamber of the House of Commons. Of course, the Downing Street predominance was begun by Margaret Thatcher, but became infinitely greater under the present Prime Minister."
* Patrick Cosgrave died 16 September 2001
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