Lord Chalfont obituary
The former Labour defence minister Lord Chalfont, who has died aged 100, had perhaps the most precipitous and unlikely rise to a political career in modern history. He was Alun Gwynne Jones, defence correspondent of the Times, at the time of the election of Harold Wilson’s first Labour government in October 1964, and in a matter of days was summoned for an unexpected briefing with the prime minister at No 10, leaving a short time later as both a minister – for disarmament, based in the Foreign Office, not the Ministry of Defence – and a life peer.
“If the word had been invented I would have said I was gobsmacked,” Chalfont told the Independent in 1995. “I have never expressed any political views that could characterise me as left or right.” In that, over time, he advised all three main parties on defence issues, he was correct. Many, however, would query that assessment, as he later took increasingly authoritarian stands in support of the Thatcher government, which led to her recommending his appointment in 1989 as deputy chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority and in 1990 as chairman of the Radio Authority.
In 1964, since he had never been a member of the Labour party (or indeed any political party), running him in a byelection for the Commons was regarded as too risky, especially as Wilson’s majority was only four. When he pointed out to the prime minister that he was not necessarily a Labour supporter, Wilson imperturbably replied: “Such ideological commitment if conscientiously pursued would mark you as unique in my administration.”
It was an astonishing career development for Gwynne Jones, born in Monmouth, south Wales, to Arthur, an electrician, and Liza (nee Hardman), a teacher. Educated at West Monmouth school in Pontypool, he was commissioned in the South Wales Borderers in 1940 and served with the regiment for 21 years.
Chalfont won the Military Cross in a hand-to-hand firefight with communist guerrillas in Malaysia in 1957, shooting an attacker at a range of two yards and disabling his grenade before it could explode. He became an intelligence officer and fluent Russian speaker during the cold war, retiring in 1961 when passed over for command of his regiment, to become the Times’s defence correspondent.
On his appointment as a minister, his editor, William Haley, told him he would have much less influence on government policy than he had working for the paper. This may have been correct: Chalfont diligently pursued Labour’s nuclear disarmament strategy, seeking to redirect resources to conventional arms, but the British proposals were eventually undermined by the Americans. An ancillary task was to prevent the frequently inebriated foreign secretary George Brown from embarrassing the government; Chalfont was the source of the famous story of Brown requesting a dance from a scarlet-clad figure at a reception who turned out to be a cardinal.
In 1967 Chalfont was placed in charge of Britain’s negotiations to join the European Common Market, during which he inadvertently caused a diplomatic incident by advising journalists that Britain might seek a free-trade deal with the US if rejected again and would consider removing troops from the defence of Germany. His offer to resign was refused by Wilson, De Gaulle vetoed the British application and troops stayed on the Rhine.
After the government’s defeat in 1970, Chalfont veered away from frontline politics, becoming a commentator – including, for a period, for the Guardian and New Statesman – a regular broadcaster and an author of eight books, mainly on military subjects, including a 1976 biography of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. His memoir, The Shadow of My Hand, was published in 2000.
He spent increasing time on directorships in the City, including Lazard merchant bank, IBM, Shandwick public relations and the VSEL shipbuilding consortium until its takeover by BAE in 1995. Not all of these ventures ended happily: within six months of his being taken on to the board of Spey Finance, a property company, in 1974, it crashed, leaving him to rue City morality: “an insight not only into what could happen but into the dubious methods of a lot of people”.
There was also an increasing obsession with supposed communist infiltration that led to his association with various rightwing pressure groups including Freedom in Sport – championing the right of cricketers to play in apartheid South Africa and of the South African athlete Zola Budd to run for Britain in the Olympics – the Institute for the Study of Terrorism, the UK Committee for a Free World and the European Atlantic Group.
There was also the Media Monitoring Group, primarily focused on alleged leftwing bias at the BBC; the corporation, Chalfont announced in 1987, employed “communists, militants and leftwing agitators of all persuasions”. The previous year he had said: “What we need is not less secrecy but a great deal more,” adding that the government had “a duty to be as draconian and severe as it thinks fit”.
Such attitudes led Thatcher to support his appointment to the oversight bodies for broadcasters, which came to a rapid end when it became clear that Shandwick and the security firm Hamilton Ingram, with which he was associated, were advising ITV companies on how to secure their franchises. These and Chalfont’s links to Zeus Security Consultants and Securipol had been denounced in the Commons, to Tory jeers, by the Lib Dem leader, Paddy Ashdown. Zeus had been engaged in the investigation and surveillance of anti-nuclear objectors to the Sizewell B nuclear power station inquiry.
Chalfont’s last campaign sought the exoneration of two RAF pilots whose helicopter crashed with the loss of 29 lives, mostly senior intelligence personnel, on the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994. The pilots were initially blamed by the RAF, but cleared in 2011.
Chalfont had a brief wartime marriage, then in 1948 married Mona Mitchell, a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps. She died in 2008 and their daughter also predeceased him.
• Alun Arthur Gwynne Jones, Lord Chalfont, politician and journalist, born 5 December 1919; died 10 January 2020
