The political correspondent Andrew Rawnsley once described Sir John Stokes as "the proud owner of one of the few prewar minds left on the Tory benches - pre Boer War, that is", and it was often difficult to believe that Stokes took himself altogether seriously. He was always ready with a well turned quote. Nevertheless, his style and views clearly suited a prosperous and overwhelmingly white seat situated on the southern edge of the Black Country with its multi racial tensions; and after his election in 1970 for Oldbury and Halesowen, he built the redistributed seat of Halesowen and Stourbridge into a Conservative stronghold before announcing in 1989 that he would not stand again. That was no mean achievement in a seat where his majority stood at only 850 in October 1974.
Stokes was at heart a romantic, a far right stalwart of the Monday Club, proud to be a patriot and a staunch supporter of the monarchy, of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, of the Empire, of the public schools, of history and hierarchy and red-blooded Englishmen, amongst whom he numbered the great bulk of the working class. He believed that they shared his thinking and that the Tory party remained the "national party of Duke and Dustman". Correspondingly, he was a staunch supporter of hanging, of the Smith regime in Rhodesia, of the voluntary repatriation of coloured immigrants, of the Turks in Cyprus, of the House Lords and the procedures of the Commons, which he saw as a bastion of English liberties. In other words he was a plain, old fashioned reactionary, who thought that his country was the worse for everything that had happened since 1939, and feared that the combination of mass immigration and a federal Europe would swamp what remained of an older England.
John Heydon Romaine Stokes, the son of a stock jobber, was educated at Temple Grove, Haileybury and Queen's College, Oxford. He became President of the Monarchist Society in 1937, and after serving as Agent and Treasurer of the Oxford University Conservative Association, lost the Presidency to Edward Heath by 7 votes, largely it was said because of his support for Franco. After a year teaching in a prep school, he joined the Royal Fusiliers, rising to the rank of Major. He took part in the Dakar expedition in 1940 and in the North African campaign and was wounded in 1943. From 1944 until he was demobilized in 1946 he served as Military Assistant to General Spears in the Lebanon and Syria. He joined ICI as a personnel officer and left them in 1951 to become the personnel manager of British Celanese. From 1957-59 he was the deputy Personnel manager of Courtaulds. From 1959 until 1980 he was a partner in Clive and Stokes, personnel consultants. He had become the Chairman of the Beaconsfield Conservative Association in 1960 and contested Gloucester in the 1964 election. Eighteen months later he lost to Shirley Williams in Hitchin and was then adopted for Oldbury and Halesowen, recapturing in 1970 a seat that had been Labour since 1945. That seat became Halesowen and Stourbridge in 1974 under boundary changes, and he held it until 1992 when he left Parliament.
Although he deplored the democratic process used to elect Conservative leaders, he was amongst the first to rally to Margaret Thatcher in her successful bid to replace Heath in 1975. The high point of his influence in the party was as chairman of an unofficial Tory immigration committee that sought to strengthen the controls on immigration in Mrs. Thatcher's first administration. Although they extracted concessions on the new immigration rules announced late in 1982, the critics overplayed their hand when they combined with the Labour Opposition to defeat the Government in December 1982. Not only did they fail to force Whitelaw to resign, but the Government withdrew the earlier concessions when they pushed the rule through in February 1983.
Stokes was a member of the Select Committee overseeing the work of the Ombudsman 1979-83 and a delegate to the Council of Europe and Western European Union 1983-92. He chaired the General Purposes committee of the Primrose League 1971-85, and as a member of General Synod, to which he was elected in 1985, sought as an Anglo-Catholic to combine with evangelicals to limit the influence of the liberal leadership in the Anglican Church.
Stokes was knighted in 1988. His first wife, Barbara, whom he had met at Oxford and married in 1939, died in 1988 and he subsequently remarried three times. The third of these marriages, the only one to end in divorce, was to the widow of Harold Macmillan's Private Secretary, Sir Timothy Bligh. Late in life Stokes became a victim of Alzheimer's and died at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford.