Lord St John of Fawsley:NORMAN ST John-Stevas, Lord St John of Fawsley, who has died aged 82, was a vivid personality in British politics. Mannered, self-applauding, with an aura of camp and given to tiffs, he had outstanding intellectual gifts, vitiated – despite an underlay of real scholarship – by eternal public performance.
Stevas, whose career reached its highest points as arts minister in Edward Heath’s Conservative government and as leader of the House of Commons, with the arts brief again, under Margaret Thatcher, made great play of his Catholicism.
Born in London, he took his surname from that of his Greek civil engineer father, Stephen Stevas, and the middle name of his Irish mother, Kitty St John O’Connor.
From school at Ratcliffe College, Leicestershire, he gained a first in law at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he was president of the union in 1950. He became a barrister in 1952, and two further degrees at Oxford were followed by tutorships there and a Yale fellowship. In 1957 he received a London University PhD on the early work of 19th-century constitutionalist Walter Bagehot. It would all be topped off with a visiting chair at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1969.
Yet Stevas’ main academic achievement came through his inspired double involvement with The Economist (1954-59), as a many-hatted correspondent and editor of the writings of Bagehot, its founder, for 30 years.
Everything suggested a political career would be as dazzling. When he entered the House of Commons in 1964, he was a published academic and top journalist. But politics was a brutal environment.
He commonly split his time between earnestness and frivolity. The frivolous Stevas appeared often with the Cambridge television satire crowd, on That Was The Week That Was. Once, he was asked by David Frost about the colour of his shirt: “What’s that – purple?” “No,” replied Stevas, “crushed cardinal.”
Stevas’s serious political career would both take off and crash with Thatcher. Stevas lacked tact and political sense. The early Thatcher, coexisting with a liberal Tory establishment that underrated her ruthlessness, was in those days often cheeked. Stevas, a player to the gallery, joined with bright, disobliging remarks, like his coinage of Thatcher as “the Blessed Margaret” or “ Leaderene”.
He said the aged Lord Thorneycroft, brought back from retirement as party chairman, was “a public monument on whom the prime minister has slapped a preservation order”; it antagonised a woman not known for humour.
In 1979 he was appointed to Thatcher’s first cabinet as Leader of the House of Commons, but was dropped in 1981 as she moved against Tory “wets”. Given a peerage in 1987, he became a leading figure in the fund-processing and patronage of the arts. In his later years, he enjoyed the pleasant, tolerably remunerated life of an aesthetic bureaucrat.
Norman Antony Francis St John-Stevas, Lord St John of Fawsley: born May 18th, 1929; died March 2nd, 2012