Alistair McAlpine, Baron McAlpine of West Green facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
The Lord McAlpine of West Green
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McAlpine in 2012
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| Member of the House of Lords | |
| In office 2 February 1984 – 26 May 2010 |
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| Personal details | |
| Born |
Robert Alistair McAlpine
14 May 1942 Mayfair, London, England |
| Died | 17 January 2014 (aged 71) Diso, Lecce, Italy |
| Children | 3 |
Robert Alistair McAlpine, Baron McAlpine of West Green (14 May 1942 – 17 January 2014) was a British businessman, politician and author who was an advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
McAlpine was descended from the McAlpine baronets who made their fortune in the construction industry. McAlpine held a variety of jobs before becoming prominent in British politics in the 1980s as the treasurer and a major fundraiser of the Conservative Party. A close ally of Thatcher, McAlpine did not support her successor as Prime Minister John Major, and later joined James Goldsmith's Referendum Party. McAlpine later rejoined the Conservatives but resigned his seat in the House of Lords.
Outside politics McAlpine was prominent in a variety of business developments in Australia as well as being an art collector and memoirist.
Contents
Early life and business career
McAlpine was born at The Dorchester in Mayfair, London. His great-grandfather was "Concrete Bob", Robert McAlpine, the first of the McAlpine baronets and the founder of the McAlpine construction firm. He was the second son of Ella Mary Gardner (Garnett) and Edwin McAlpine, the fifth Baronet, and the brother of William McAlpine, the sixth Baronet. He described his childhood as "idyllic" but not luxurious. He went to boarding school at the age of six. He had dyslexia and left Stowe School at 16 with three O-levels. He then worked on a McAlpine building site on the South Bank, keeping time and dealing with wage packets.
At the age of 21, McAlpine became a director of the company, at the time named Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons. He made money in property development in Australia and worked in the building business until he entered politics.
McAlpine founded his own publishing house in London in the 1960s, and was an art dealer, art collector, zookeeper (in Broome, Western Australia), horticulturist, beekeeper, agriculturist, gardener and passionate traveller.
Politics
Though the inner circle of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson had once considered appointing McAlpine as a fundraiser, McAlpine was entranced by the new Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher at a 1975 dinner party, and she soon appointed him Conservative treasurer, a position he would retain until 1990. They continued to have a close working relationship throughout her time as prime minister and he led the fundraising efforts for the Conservative's general election campaigns. He would later describe his relationship with Thatcher in his book The Servant. Using Machiavelli's The Prince for his analogy, the "Servant" (himself) is an important part of the success of the "Prince" (Thatcher). McAlpine's obituary in The Daily Telegraph described him as "... probably the most successful fundraiser the party ever had; yet by nature a dilettante, he did not become a significant political figure" and "... never really "into" politics. At heart he was an 18th-century amateur"
McAlpine's personal political views were varied and included Euroscepticism and support for electric cars.
McAlpine was nominated to the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1980, despite protests at a perceived lack of experience in the field and his opposition to public subsidisation of the arts. He served on the Council from 1981 to 1982. Other public bodies on which McAlpine served included the Theatre Investment Fund, of which he was chairman. He was also a trustee of the Royal Opera House and a director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
McAlpine was created a life peer in the 1984 New Year Honours, taking the title Baron McAlpine of West Green, of West Green in the County of Hampshire.
As party treasurer, McAlpine raised large sums to support the Conservative Party in elections. Often this was done over lunches with business leaders, by pointing out the problems with Labour candidates. Money would never be discussed directly at the lunches, McAlpine would later say that "I used to lurk...I lurked all over London where rich people went." The Conservative party had raised £1.5 million the year before McAlpine became treasurer, the figures had increased to £4 million by the 1979 general election, and more than £9 million by the time of Thatcher's departure in 1990. McAlpine also channelled funds through offshore accounts, and received funds from US and Hong Kong nationals. One of the funders of the era was Asil Nadir of Northern Cyprus, who was in 2012 convicted of stealing money from the Polly Peck company. McAlpine said the Conservative party had a "moral duty" to return Nadir's donations, totaling £400,000, to the creditors of Polly Peck. Other foreign businessmen courted by McAlpine included Li Ka-shing and Mohamed Al-Fayed. McAlpine also claimed that he worked to help Major raise a large sum from Greek businessman Yiannis Latsis, though Major denied it.
McAlpine was allegedly on a target list of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). He was on Thatcher's team when the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, but was not injured. In 1990 the IRA bombed West Green House, a mansion in Hartley Wintney, where he had lived just weeks before, and where in the past Thatcher had been a guest. In the mid-1980s, for reasons of safety and tax, McAlpine decided to move to Monaco and Venice. Before his departure he had sold many of his possessions at Sotheby's.
McAlpine was deputy chairman of the party from 1979 to 1983. After Thatcher left in 1990, he remained fiercely supportive of her, and dismissive of her successor John Major, particularly his policies on the European Union. McAlpine joined James Goldsmith's Referendum Party six months before the 1997 general election, chairing its October 1996 party conference. He was expelled from the Conservatives in the House of Lords soon thereafter. In 1997 he became the Referendum Party's leader following Goldsmith's death, although the party would soon become defunct. He was very critical of the Conservative Party under William Hague and sat as an Independent Conservative for some time in the House of Lords before rejoining the Conservatives.
In 1997 McAlpine was briefly involved in the movement by some British conservatives to help Chechnya, especially by trying to support its oil industry. Alongside former Chechen mafia boss and Chechen First Deputy Premier Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev he created the private holding company Caucasian Common Market.
In order to maintain his non-domiciled status and so be able to avoid paying UK residents' taxes, McAlpine stepped down from his seat in the House of Lords in 2010 because of a constitutional amendment to the British tax code.
McAlpine liked the Conservative Party chairman Cecil Parkinson, and disliked Parkinson's successor, John Gummer, whom he thought dull. Owing to his influence over Thatcher, McAlpine was said to have ensured Gummer's replacement as party chairman by Norman Tebbit.
Australia
McAlpine first went to Western Australia around 1960, after hearing that the government was to privatise road-building. In the mid-1960s he went to Perth to work, developing office blocks and the first five-star hotel in the city.
In the 1980s McAlpine attempted to invigorate the tourism business in Broome. McAlpine had first been impressed with Broome in the late 1970s. He felt the area had great tourism potential. He invested $500 million on various developments, such as restoring crumbling buildings, fixing up a cinema, and creating the Cable Beach Resort club and the Pearl Coast Zoological Gardens. He bought a stake in a pearl farm, and helped promote the South Sea Pearl. He promoted local culture including Aboriginal artwork. He spent several months a year there, for a time.
McAlpine gave to charities as well as startup businesses. The changes were not without controversy, explored for example in the 1990 documentary film Lord of the Bush by Tom Zubrycki. Economic conditions worsened in the early 1990s, and tourism was affected by the 1989 Australian pilots' dispute. McAlpine had to sell his stakes and leave in the mid-1990s. The zoo closed, but many of his efforts lasted, such as the Cable Beach club. When he revisited Broome in 2012 he was described positively in several media stories and the town leaders honoured him as Freeman of the Municipality.
Art and collecting
McAlpine had been a passionate collector of a wide range of objets d'art and ephemera since his youth. He had a "cupboard of curiosities" as a child, including a snake in a bottle, and a piece of a Zeppelin air ship. Later objects collected by McAlpine included beads, books, furniture, police truncheons, dolls, textiles, ties, sculpture, rare breeds of chicken and Renaissance tapestries. He was an early collector of the American painter Mark Rothko. He was very interested in Abstract expressionism and artists such as Morris Louis and Jackson Pollock. He also collected the work of Australian painter Sidney Nolan. McAlpine made collections of folk art from various continents. In the 1980s he commissioned 100 stone sculptures of human heads from Big John Dodo, at a price of A$1,000 per head. He was also interested in modern sculpturists such as William Turnbull, Naum Gabo, Michael Bolus and David Annesley. He owned a gallery on Cork Street as well. He once owned a warehouse to store his collections, but also he periodically sold or donated portions of them to museums.
In 1970 McAlpine donated 60 sculptures to the Tate, including works by Turnbull, Annesley, and Bolus, as well as Phillip King, Tim Scott, William Tucker, and Isaac Witkin.
In the 1970s McAlpine and the classical architect Quinlan Terry constructed various follies in the grounds of West Green House. One of these, a 50 foot high column topped by an elaborately carved design, bears a Latin inscription declaring that "this monument was built with a great deal of money which otherwise someday would have been given into the hands of the public revenue". McAlpine also constructed a classical triumphal arch topped with an obelisk that bears a plaque dedicating the arch to the "first lady Prime Minister of Great Britain". Other features in the folly garden include a trompe-l'œil nymphaeum, a smoke house, an "eye catcher", Chinese cow sheds and an island gazebo.
Personal life
McAlpine lived in several parts of the world including England, Western Australia, Paris, Venice and Southern Italy.
In 1987 he had heart bypass surgery, which led him to relax his lifestyle. In 1999 he had further heart bypass surgery, which led to complications resulting in his having a tracheotomy and, as a result of that, difficulty in speaking. He was in a coma for a month on a life-support machine following his second heart operation, after which he experienced a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, emerged declaring that he felt "more casual about life".
Marriages
McAlpine was married three times. He married for the first time in 1964, to Sarah Baron. They had two daughters together and divorced shortly after McAlpine became the Conservative Party treasurer. His two daughters did not speak to him for many years following the divorce.
McAlpine married his second wife, Romilly Hobbs, in 1980. She had been his political secretary and was a "glamorous and popular hostess" during Thatcher's premiership. McAlpine and Hobbs had a daughter, cook book writer Skye McAlpine, and divorced shortly after McAlpine's second heart operation.
In early 2002 McAlpine married his third wife, Athena Malpas. She was born in Dublin of a Greek shipping family. The couple met when she was working for the youth wing of the Referendum Party, and married in Paris, with his reconciled daughters present. They moved to Southern Italy, renovated an old convent, and opened a bed and breakfast. Convento di Santa Maria di Costantinopoli is near the village of Diso, in the vicinity of the coastal city of Lecce.
Death
McAlpine died on 17 January 2014 at his home in Italy, aged 71.
Arms
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Writing
McAlpine wrote (sometimes in collaboration) a number of books and contributed to periodicals, including The World of Interiors. A partial bibliography follows.
- The Servant. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. ISBN: 9780571173402. This work discusses his relationship with Thatcher. He later re-released it as part of a compilation called The Ruthless Leader, which also included The Art of War by Sun Tzu and The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, along with an introduction.
- Letters to a Young Politician – From his uncle. London: Faber & Faber, 1995. ISBN: 9780571170579.
- Once a Jolly Bagman: Memoirs. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997. ISBN: 9780297817376.
Contains numerous critical comments about former associates such as John Major, Edward Heath, and Michael Heseltine.
- The New Machiavelli: The art of politics in business. New York; Chichester: John Wiley, 1998. ISBN: 9780471350958.
- Collecting and Display, with Cathy Giangrande. London: Conran Octopus, 1998. ISBN: 9781850299561.
- The Collector's Companion: A source book of public collections in Europe and the USA, with Cathy Giangrande. London: Everyman, 2001. ISBN: 9781841590806.
- Bagman to Swagman. London: Allen & Unwin, 1999. ISBN: 9781865083896.
- Adventures of a Collector. London: Allen & Unwin, 2002. ISBN: 9781865087863.
- Triumph from Failure: Lessons from Life for Business Success, with Kate Dixey. New York: Texere, 2003. ISBN: 9781587991813.
