Michael Ancram, who has died aged 79, was an ambitious, popular, shrewd and effective Conservative politician who had the common misfortune throughout his career of either being the right man in the wrong place or of being there at the wrong time.
Although he rose to become chairman of the party and its deputy leader in opposition, he never made cabinet rank in government and was humiliated when he contested the leadership of the party during its wilderness years after the 1997 election.
His career was blighted by two considerable factors which, at other times in the history of the party would have been regarded as signal advantages: he was a wealthy aristocrat with a long lineage of landed privilege and he was a One Nation liberal-minded Tory; the problem was that his principal ministerial opportunities occurred during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, who regarded both facts with the utmost suspicion.
She did give him his first junior ministerial job at the Scottish Office in 1983, but that came beribboned with responsibility for the introduction of the hated poll tax in Scotland (where it first came into effect) and undoubtedly led to the loss of his Commons seat at Edinburgh South in 1987.
The most significant, if understated, achievement of his political career came after his return to the Commons as MP for Devizes at the following election, in 1992, by which time John Major was prime minister. Ancram was appointed parliamentary under-secretary to the Northern Ireland office in 1993, fulfilling the requirement for a Catholic among the ministerial team, and in less than a year was promoted to minister of state. During this time he was effectively responsible for drafting what became the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and in 1995, after a series of negotiations with the Unionists, he became the first British minister to negotiate openly with Sinn Féin.
Major wrote approvingly in his memoirs of how Ancram skilfully moved the peace process forwards and it seemed likely that he would have been promoted to Northern Ireland secretary, if there had been a reshuffle before the 1997 election.
In the untidy aftermath of the Conservative defeat at that election by Tony Blair’s Labour party, he was instead given shadow cabinet responsibility for constitutional affairs by the new Tory leader, William Hague, with a remit to oppose the incoming government’s commitment to devolution to Scotland and Wales, a policy Ancram had himself endorsed.
Having been made party chairman in 1998 and having successfully fought off the firestorm that beset the Conservatives on a number of fronts after the cataclysmic electoral defeat, he appeared to believe after the party’s further defeat in the 2001 election that his was the candidacy for leadership that could best serve to “heal the wounds” and unite the warring party.
In keeping with the family motto Sero sed serio (Late but in earnest) he put his name forward as the last of the four candidates for the leadership and was mercilessly eliminated on the first ballot. The successful Iain Duncan Smith rewarded him, however, with the deputy leadership and the significant post of shadow foreign secretary, and when Michael Howard took over in 2003, he retained Ancram in situ. His last shadow cabinet appointment for a few months in 2005 was as shadow defence secretary, from which he resigned on the election of David Cameron as party leader.
Ancram’s evident pragmatism probably had a great deal to do with his antecedents. His own political motto, which came from Disraeli, was “oppose, adapt, adopt”, and he had examples to follow from both of his parents, who were distantly related to each other.
His father, Peter Kerr, the 12th Marquess of Lothian, was an unwavering Conservative who worked for Alec Douglas-Home, prime minister 1963-64, as a junior health minister, and was a junior Foreign Office minister after Edward Heath became prime minister in 1970. Douglas-Home was a political hero to whom young Michael (with the courtesy title of the Earl of Ancram) went for advice and whom he described as a great influence. His mother, Tony (Antonella) Newland, was a vibrant, Labour-voting, half-Italian journalist and broadcaster who might herself in a later age have become a full-time politician.
She co-founded the annual Women of the Year lunch to raise money for charity, and was a forceful campaigner for numerous causes, which included picketing the Soviet embassy to try to secure the release of Andrei Sakharov when he was detained in the 1980s. She lost an eye to cancer in 1970 and for the rest of her life wore a piratical eyepatch. “She made me accept that politics is not something on which you have a rigid view,” Ancram once told me. “You listen to people, you argue, you adapt your politics to what you’re hearing.”
Born in London, Michael was the second of six children and spent his early childhood at Melbourne Hall, Derbyshire. This was one of the two family estates – the other being Monteviot House, Jedburgh, in the Scottish Borders – and provided a formative political influence. He would later point out that many Scots politicians, born and educated only in Scotland, never really understand the English or how they think; while not exactly raised in the milieu of ordinary English society, he believed he knew what the English were about.
He was educated at home by a governess until the age of 10. An asthma sufferer, he was sent to school in Switzerland for the next three years: he became fluent in French and Italian and, having overcome his asthma, became an enthusiastic and successful skier.
From Ampleforth college, North Yorkshire, he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he was awarded a history degree in 1966 and then the University of Edinburgh where he qualified in law; in the nature of Scottish society, he made many lifelong friends from all parties.
He busked round Italy as a folk-singing student and retained an enthusiastic and highly competent mastery of the acoustic guitar all his life. He impersonated Buddy Holly and sang the protest songs of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Tom Paxton. He also boasted about hanging out in the Troubadour club in Fulham and meeting Paul Simon.
He took his mother with him when he went campaigning for his first crack at the Commons, when he stood against the redoubtable Labour MP Tam Dalyell in what was then West Lothian in 1970. Dalyell said that he was the most able candidate who had ever stood against him, albeit in a hopeless cause, and that his constituents were, besides, enormously impressed with the Marchioness.
In February 1974, the first of the year’s two general elections, Ancram took on another formidable Labour politician, John P Mackintosh, and won Berwickshire and East Lothian, only to lose it in the second election in the October re-run. It gave him the taste that he knew he was going to like.
In 1979 he stood against the Labour candidate, Gordon Brown, in Edinburgh South and won narrowly – by 2,460 on a reduced majority – but it was enough to put him in the House for the next eight years. Thatcher made him chairman of the Scottish Tories (1980-83) and then a junior minister at the Scottish Office (1983-87).
He was a happy man in the Commons: clubbable, funny and good company. He was the same whether he was wearing the chalk-striped suits of the weekday or corduroys and jumpers in the country. During the short time he practised as an advocate at the Scottish bar, from 1970, he dispensed with his title, on the grounds that it was too confusing for jurors if he was addressed as “My lord”, and became plain Michael Ancram (although he should properly have called himself Michael Kerr – at the time of his death he was hereditary chief of the Scottish Kerr clan). He was known, however, as “the undercover earl” or “Mr Norman Crumb”, this last from a mishearing by the man barking the names of guests at a party reception line.
He had a natural instinct for self-promotion and did not hide his ambition, but he also loved the gossip and fun of politics. He was a founding member of the “Blue Chips” , a group of 12 clever and capable young Tories elected in 1979, the majority of whom became cabinet ministers. When he lost his Scottish seat – one of three ministers with Scottish seats to do so in 1987 – he had no hesitation in seeking a more comfortable berth in the south, and secured the candidacy in Devizes, Wiltshire, in 1992. The constituency party was impressed by his stated readiness to renounce his peerage in the event of his father’s death.
By the time his father died in 2004, however, the 1999 Lords reform legislation had already disqualified him from the automatic right to membership. He announced that he would not fight the 2010 election, citing coronary problems, but he had also been bruised by the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009 with revelations, that while owning a personal fortune worth an estimated £27m including six tenanted farms in the Scottish Borders and Midlothian, he had claimed £14,000 at his second home for gardening expenses, moss removal from his house and Aga repairs. He repaid £98.58 for repair work to the swimming pool boiler.
Later in 2010 he entered the Lords as a life peer, Lord Kerr of Monteviot. In his book The Magical Gardens of Monteviot (2018) he acknowledged the influence of the Northern Irish gardens he had visited as a minister in the mid-1990s.
He is survived by his wife, Jane (nee Fitzalan-Howard), the daughter of the 16th Duke of Norfolk, whom he married in 1975, and by their daughters Clare and Mary.
• Michael Ancram (Michael Andrew Foster Jude Kerr), 13th Marquess of Lothian, and a life peer as Lord Kerr of Monteviot, politician, born 7 July 1945; died 1 October 2024
