© John Barnes
8 January 2005
for The Independent
In his brief but delightful memoir, Stand Up and Be Counted, Sir Anthony Meyer wrote: "Like Lord Byron, I woke up one day and found myself famous; unlike Lord Byron I had no achievement to justify that fame." The self deprecation was characteristic, but Meyer had never lacked the courage of his convictions, and he was sufficiently well-breeched not to care too much about the consequences. It says much for his unsquashable optimism, however, that he did not expect his move to cost him his Parliamentary seat even though he was about to challenge the Conservative Party's most formidable Prime Minister of modern times for the leadership of the party. He did not expect to have to carry the challenge through, believing that a more qualified candidate would appear, but Sir Ian Gilmour, the most likely to step in, concluded that it was best that the vote should be seen not as the choice of a leader, but a straight vote of no confidence in Mrs Thatcher and Meyer was content that it should be so. Failure was inevitable, but significantly in addition to the 33 votes he took, there were 24 spoiled ballots and only 314 votes for Mrs Thatcher. One sixth of her party had not rallied to her cause, and Meyer subsequently reflected that he had made what was once unthinkable, thinkable. A year later, Mrs Thatcher fell. The Conservative Party had come to agree with Meyer that she could no longer win the next General Election.
That had only been one of his reasons for standing. The other was a deep-rooted dislike for her attitude to Europe. Membership of the European Community was the cause which had brought Meyer into politics twenty-seven years earlier, and remained the focus of his activities after his enforced retirement from the House of Commons in 1992.
Anthony John Meyer was the third baronet. His grandfather, Carl, had arrived in England at the end of the 19th century and had joined Rothschilds. The baronetcy was the result of a decision to give £70,000 to the cause of a National Theatre. His father served as the Conservative MP for Great Yarmouth from 1924 to 1929, but was too involved in his business activities with De Beers to take up the offer of a safe seat in 1931. Meyer himself was an Etonian, Captain of the Oppidans and Secretary of the Political Society. While awaiting call up, he spent a year reading history at New College Oxford and found himself a wife, Barbadee, an artist, who was fascinated by politics, and a tower of strength during his life first as a diplomat and then as a politician.
Meyer joined the Scots Guards in July 1941 and by way of Brigade HQ eventually found himself posted to the Divisional HQ and it was in that capacity that he found himself in a Sherman Tank equipped for communications rather than action during the battle for Normandy in June 1944. His war was ended abruptly by a German shell that left him badly wounded with a fragment of the shell lodged near his spine. He emerged from hospital just in time to witness the VE celebrations.
His first job postwar was a temporary post at the Treasury winding up the affairs of the Polish Government in exile, but after a year he took the entrance examination for the Civil Service and was persuaded that he and his wife were well fitted for the diplomatic life. After four years in the Northern Department of the Foreign Office, watching the Cold War develop, he was posted to Paris where he took a close interest in the negotiations for the European Defence Community and Western European Union and became First Secretary at the Embassy. His next posting to Moscow 1956-58, but it ended embarrassingly when he was the victim of a classic Soviet entrapment exercise. Returned to London, he served first in the Economic Relations Department and then in the Western Organisations Department. Although not involved in the EEC negotiations, he saw enough of Heath to conceive an enormous admiration for him, but his political outlook had already been formed by earlier events - an enthusiasm for Streit's Union Now while at Eton, a detestation of Socialism and nationalism born of his experiences with the Soviet Union, and a belief that European unity was essential. Believing that he should do his best to further that last ideal, he resigned from the Foreign Office in July 1962 and became Director of Research for the Common Market campaign, a job that must have lost some savour when de Gaulle vetoed British entry in January 1963.
In the autumn of 1962 he had joined the Conservative party and he began to seek a seat for the forthcoming General Election. He was fortunate to find Eton and Slough, where the existing candidate had been forced to retire, and he set himself to woo the large Asian vote. In 1964, against the trend, his was one of four seats won by the Conservative party and perhaps the only one where the race card had not been played. He ran into some trouble with his constituency Association when he defied the party whip to vote in favour of an oil sanction on Rhodesia, but survived, only to find his majority of 11 easily overturned at the March 1966 election. After a short period nursing a seat he no longer expected to win, Meyer volunteered his services to the Conservative Research Department and was asked to liaise with senior staff at the Universities. Although he resigned after eighteen months, aghast that the party would not find money for a research project on regenerating the inner cities, his work had led him to create a right wing journal, Solon, which Peter Utley edited. After four issues, it was clear that it was never going to be viable and his long quest for another seat seemed in the meantime to have run into the sand. However, the retiring MP for West Flint, decided that Meyer should be his successor and with his firm backing Meyer won the nomination and the seat. His close friend, Maurice Macmillan, asked him to be his PPS and the period of the Heath Government was perhaps Meyer's happiest time in politics. Entry into the EEC was achieved and Meyer was happy both with the Government's toughness on the trade unions and its turn to an incomes policy. In opposition, after the Government's defeat in February 1974, Meyer was an early advocate of the proposal for a government of national unity, subsequently espoused by Heath in his ill-fated October 1974 campaign.
Although he admired her courage and determination, and was largely convinced by her economic policies, Meyer disliked Mrs Thatcher's style and vision, but his first major act of rebellion was his reasoned condemnation of the use of force to regain the Falklands on 14 April 1982, an act of conspicuous courage since his constituency was about to disappear, split in two by the proposed revision of constituency boundaries. Initially his constituency executive accepted his dissent, but a subsequent Panorama programme, which carried his views, but highlighted the far more critical stance of Tam Dalyell, bitterly offended the party and led to a battle for the nomination to Clwyd North West in which an MEP, Beata Brookes, defeated both sitting MPs, winning the Executive's backing on the second ballot. Her name would be put forward for adoption. Initially Meyer accepted the result, but he was then advised that since there had been no overall winner on the first ballot, more than one name should have gone forward to a general meeting. Meyer sued and won - and in the subsequent general meeting he won the right to be the candidate at the forthcoming election by 420 to 280 votes.
Although he was an assiduous and popular constituency MP, Meyer increasingly found himself at odds with his leader and he frequently defied the whips. By November 1985 he was urging Francis Pym to launch a challenge to Mrs Thatcher's leadership and in He called for her resignation over the Westland affair. He was particularly critical of the poll tax and of the campaign waged in the 1989 European elections, and thought Mrs Thatcher wrong to have forced Nigel Lawson to resign. Essentially it was Mrs Thatcher's attitude to Europe that led him to challenge her. Although the move ended his Parliamentary career, he was happy at the eventual outcome, although he would have preferred to see Michael Heseltine leader of his party. His own fate was less happy. His continuing efforts to reverse his deselection were brought to an untimely end by revelations in the tabloids of a twenty year affaire with Simone Lawrence, a West Indian model and Blues singer.
Meyer was a highly intelligent man with self-deprecating charm and great moral courage. That extended to an honest admission that he could get things badly wrong - he came to believe that true about his actions over the Falklands and he doubted whether his unquestioning support for Mrs Thatcher's monetarist policies had been wise - but there was never any doubt in his mind that he had been right to bring Mrs Thatcher down and, as Policy Director of the European Movement until 1999, he continued to campaign up and down the country for the cause of European unity, the unquestioned leitmotiv of his political life.