Cecil Parkinson, Thatcher’s soulmate, dies aged 84

Cecil Parkinson, who died on Monday at the age of 84, belonged, albeit fleetingly, to that unfortunate group of politicians known as “ex-future prime ministers”. At the peak of his powers in mid-1983 he was seen as a natural successor should Margaret Thatcher have fallen under the proverbial bus. But it was not to be. His affair with his secretary, Sara Keays, led to his resignation from the cabinet and four years in the political wilderness.

Cecil Edward Parkinson was born in 1931 and grew up in the Lancashire railway town of Carnforth. A chartered accountant by profession, and a partner in West Wake Price from 1961 to 1971, he made his name — and money — in the building world in the 1960s through his company Parkinson Hart Securities. He married Ann Jarvis in 1957 and they raised three daughters. Parkinson was a tall, suave and genial man whose matinee idol looks could reduce Tory ladies of a certain age to jelly. But these also masked a keen political brain and a sense of mischief which won him admirers across the party.

Parkinson was first elected to parliament at a 1970 by-election in Enfield West, following the death of the chancellor, Iain Macleod. In the last days of the 1970-74 Heath government he became a junior whip, but it was the election of Margaret Thatcher to the Conservative party leadership that sparked his political rise. He specialised in trade policy in the opposition period from 1976 to 1979 and became trade minister in the first Thatcher administration.

But it was his sudden promotion to chairman of the Conservative party, replacing the octogenarian Lord Thorneycroft, in 1981 where he made his name. By common consent he proved to be one of the most outstanding Tory party chairmen of the late 20th century. He reformed Conservative Central Office, recruiting several leading businessmen — such as Christopher Lawson from Mars — to key roles in the marketing and organisation of the party. Parkinson also oversaw the introduction of targeted direct mail campaigns to recruit new members and raise money.

In April 1982, at the suggestion of Norman Tebbit, Parkinson became a key member of Margaret Thatcher's five-strong Falklands War Cabinet. Tebbit felt Thatcher needed some support in case the more dovelike Francis Pym and Willie Whitelaw lost their collective nerve. He was highly successful in presenting the government’s case during the three-month conflict and his political stock was certainly on the rise.

During the following 12 months Parkinson was hardly off the nation’s television screens attacking the newly formed SDP/Liberal Alliance and the unilateralist policy of Michael Foot’s Labour party. June 10 1983 should have been the happiest day of Parkinson’s life: in the early hours it became clear the Conservatives were heading for the biggest electoral landslide in the party’s history. As architect of that victory, Parkinson’s career was at its summit.

In the early hours of that morning he told the prime minister that he had been having a long-term affair with his secretary, Sara Keays, who was about to have his baby. Thatcher had planned to appoint Parkinson foreign secretary later that day, thereby sending out the signal he was her chosen heir. Instead, she sent him to trade and industry. Four months later, in the middle of the Conservative party’s annual conference, he was forced to resign after The Times printed Ms Keays’ allegations that Parkinson had promised to marry her, then reneged on the promise. Some commentators felt it deeply ironic that Parkinson resigned because he had decided to stay with his wife rather than leave her for his mistress.

Although Parkinson had only spent four months at the DTI he managed to privatise British Telecom and introduce changes to the way the London Stock Exchange operated, known as the City’s “Big Bang”. These changes helped the LSE maintain its competitive position against Frankfurt, New York and Hong Kong.

During his period out of the cabinet Parkinson never hid his desire to return to the front of the political stage. This was not a sign of naked ambition or careerism, more a desire to wipe the epithet “disgraced” from his name. He often said to friends he was fed up with being described as the “disgraced former Tory party chairman” and the only way to rid himself of that description was to come back.

But when he did return to the cabinet in June 1987, he was never quite the same. Somehow the political spark had been extinguished. While he was a competent energy secretary, the complexities of electricity privatisation appeared too much for him and led to a sideways move to transport, rather than the Treasury, which he had long coveted.

When Thatcher fell in November 1990 Parkinson decided to leave, too, sick to his stomach at the way his parliamentary colleagues had treated his political protector. This was demonstrated during the last meeting of the Thatcher cabinet: as she was reading out a prepared statement about her future she kept breaking down in tears. It was all too much for Parkinson, who blurted out to the Lord Chancellor who was sitting beside her: “For God’s sake, James, you bloody read it.”

Parkinson’s contempt for John Major, Thatcher’s successor, was never easily hidden and his deservedly poorly reviewed 1992 memoirs, Right at the Centre, left the reader with the distinct feeling that although he considered himself to be a key member of the Thatcherite vanguard, he had never achieved what he set out to. He left parliament at the 1992 general election and immediately went to the House of Lords as Lord Parkinson of Carnforth.

This, however, was not the end of his political career. He became the founding chairman of Conservative Way Forward, a group committed to keeping the Thatcherite flame alive. In 1998 he experienced a year-long Indian summer when William Hague brought him back into frontline politics as party chairman. He fought continual battles with the party’s chief executive, the MP Archie Norman, whose McKinseyite approach to reforming the party and Conservative Central Office proved to be something of a disaster.

It was not a happy year, and after that Parkinson stuck to the Lords, retiring from that house last September.

Iain Dale