RIP Michael Ancram (1945-2024)

A genial presence in the Conservative Party who never quite reached the top rank due to electoral setbacks

Michael Ancram, the former deputy leader of the Conservative Party who has died aged 79, had a respectable political career spanning 40 years or so, though it is strange to think that he never sat in a cabinet. This is not intended as a comprehensive obituary—though I may end up writing one because I find Ancram an interesting figure—but rather an opportunity for me to make a few observations about him and reflect on various ways in which his career, and therefore his public profile and legacy, might have been very different.

To begin with, his name was not Michael Ancram. He was born Michael Andrew Foster Jude Kerr on 7 July 1945, the second child and first son of the 12th Marquess of Lothian and his wife (and distant relative) Antonella Reuss Newland. As the heir to his father’s peerage, he was styled Earl of Ancram, the marquess’s next most senior title, by courtesy (I explained courtesy titles in an essay last year). It led to him being nicknamed “Crumb” by some friends in the 1960s after he gave his name at a party, correctly, as “Lord Ancram” and after a mishearing was formally announced as “Mr Norman Crumb”.

Having studied history at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1963 to 1966, Ancram graduated as a Bachelor of Law (LLB) from the University of Edinburgh in 1968 and, after completing his legal training, was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1970. It was while practising as an advocate that he decided to stop using his courtesy title, on the grounds that juries were sometimes confused when judges addressed the young advocate as “my Lord”, and thereafter used the comprehensible but illogical and muddled style of “Mr Michael Ancram”. He was known by that name until he stepped down from the House of Commons in 2010, but in fact since October 2004, when his father had died, he had been the 13th Marquess of Lothian. Given the exclusion of most hereditary peers from Parliament under the provisions of the House of Lords Act 1999, he was able to remain an MP, the third hereditary peer to sit in the Commons (apart from Irish peers) after John (3rd Viscount) Thurso, Liberal Democrat MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross from 2001 to 2015, and Douglas Hogg (3rd Viscount Hailsham), Conservative MP for Grantham from 1979 to 1997 and Sleaford and North Hykeham from 1997 to 2010.

After retiring as an MP, he was given a life peerage as Lord Teviot of Monteviot, being introduced into the House of Lords on 22 November 2010. Although he sat by virtue of a life barony, he was known by his senior title of Marquess of Lothian. From June 2017, when the former leader of the House of Lords, the 7th Marquess of Salisbury, retired, he was the only marquess in the upper house. Had the House of Lords Act 1999 never been passed, of course, Ancram would have been forced to make a decision after his father’s death in 2004 whether to accept being excluded from the House of Commons or disclaim the peerage he had just inherited. This latter option had been possible since the passage of the Peerage Act 1963, under which someone inheriting a peerage unwillingly had to give an instrument of disclaimer to the Lord Chancellor.

The last sitting Member of Parliament to inherit a peerage before the House of Lords Act 1999 had been Lord James Douglas-Hamilton (Con, Edinburgh West). In November 1994, the 10th Earl of Selkirk died at the age of 88, and Douglas-Hamilton, Selkirk’s nephew, was the heir. Another nephew, Alasdair Douglas-Hamilton, contested the succession (ultimately without success), but Lord James was faced with a difficult decision. He was a member of the government, as under-secretary of state for Scotland, though could perfectly reasonably have continued in that office as a peer, but the prime minister, John Major, had a very slender majority in the House of Commons of just 14 with a by-election pending in Dudley West on 15 December. Although the previous MP had been a Conservative, the party was almost bound to lose as it had done at three previous contests that parliament.

Lord James, recognised as next in line to the earldom, was not able to sit or vote from the moment his uncle died. If he accepted his inheritance, it would take one more MP off the government’s majority and cause a by-election in Edinburgh West; as Lord James had only won by 879 votes at the general election in 1992, it would inevitably fall to the opposition (in this case the Liberal Democrats). For the good of the party and the government, therefore, he delivered his instrument of disclaimer and remained in the House of Commons. He was promoted to minister of state for Scotland in July the following year but was defeated in Edinburgh West at the 1997 general election. There was, however, a second act to his political career: in September 1997 he was introduced to the House of Lords with a life peerage as Lord Selkirk of Douglas, and from 1999 to 2007 he was a Member of the Scottish Parliament on the Lothians regional list. He retired from the House of Lords in July 2023, and died in November aged 81.

Ancram might well have chosen to disclaim his peerage of the House of Lords Act 1999 has not existed. In October 2004, when his father died, he was deputy leader of the Conservative Party under Michael Howard and serving as shadow foreign secretary. A general election was likely to be held in 2005, and as Tony Blair approached the end of his second term as prime minister, the opinion polls suggested that Labour held a lead over the Conservatives but not always a comfortable one: when Ancram’s father died, it was only three weeks since a survey had shown a lead of only two per cent, hard on the heels of another showing four per cent. In the end, Labour scored an easy third victory in May 2005 with a (reduced) majority of 66 seats, but the previous autumn it was not absurd to think that the Conservatives had a fighting chance of winning.

One other feature of Ancram’s career was his fragile membership of the House of Commons. He was unusual in representing three entirely different constituencies—Berwick and East Lothian February-September 1974, Edinburgh South 1979-87 and Devizes 1992-2010—and those absences and gaps in service undoubtedly hindered his career progression. He was a Scottish Office minister from 1983 to 1987 and lost his seat while in ministerial office, and would not return to the front bench until January 1994 when he was appointed minister of state for Northern Ireland.

And yet he had achieved success at an early age: he was only 28 when he was first elected as an MP in 1974, and after his return to the House in 1979 (when his defeated Labour opponent was Gordon Brown) he was soon appointed chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party in 1980. It seems entirely plausible, therefore, that if he had won a safe seat in 1974, rather than defeating the constitutional scholar John Mackintosh by 540 votes in February and losing to him by 2,740 in October, he would likely have risen further and faster. After all, fellow Conservative newcomers in February 1974 included Leon Brittan (Cleveland and Whitby), Douglas Hurd (Mid-Oxfordshire), Nigel Lawson (Blaby), John MacGregor (Norfolk South), John Moore (Croydon Central), Antony Newton (Braintree), Malcolm Rifkind (Edinburgh Pentlands), John Wakeham (Maldon) and Sir George Young (Ealing Acton), all of whom would go on to occupy senior cabinet positions.

After the Conservative Party’s electoral drubbing in 1997, Ancram, then in his early 50s, did finally get to the most senior levels. He was spokesman for constitutional affairs and then party chairman, before standing for the leadership and a unifying candidate in 2001 when William Hague resigned. He came fifth and last, but after his elimination he backed eventual winner Iain Duncan Smith against Kenneth Clarke. His reward was to be named deputy leader and shadow foreign secretary, and he continued in that role under Michael Howard. After May 2005 he served briefly as shadow defence secretary then stood down from the shadow cabinet when David Cameron assumed the leadership at the end of the year. For the rest of the parliament, he was a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee.

A strange, disjoined career, then. Ancram’s two defeats in marginal constituencies robbed him of momentum which would surely have allowed him to be a contender for a cabinet post by the early 1990s, and by the time he occupied a safe seat and was reaching his prime in the mid- to late 1990s, the Conservative Party had gone into what would be a 13-year period of opposition. He will be remembered for his dedication to the peace process as minister of state for Northern Ireland from 1994 to 1997, when, with responsibility for political development, he managed to keep the various parties engaged in negotiations while different elements of a settlement were gradually put into place. He will also be missed as a cheerful and unstuffy presence in the senior ranks of the Conservatives, and for his regular renditions of folk and country music on an acoustic guitar at party conferences and other gatherings.

Ancram and his wife Lady Jane Fitzalan-Howard, daughter of the 16th Duke of Norfolk, had three daughters (of whom the second, Lady Clare Kerr, married Douglas Hurd’s son Nick in 2010), and of course most peerage titles cannot be inherited by women. He is therefore succeeded as 14th Marquess of Lothian by his younger brother, Lord Ralph Kerr, former high sheriff of Derbyshire.