Lord Harris of High Cross was born on December 10, 1924.
That means he would have been 100-years-old today. Instead he died, aged 81, on October 19, 2006.
I was unaware of the significance of today’s date until last week when I saw that the Institute of Economic Affairs was hosting a Ralph Harris Centenary Lecture at Church Hall, Westminster, on December 9 (ie last night).
But it got me thinking about Ralph, who was chairman of Forest for 20 years from 1987 until his death 18 years ago.
I first met him in November 1998. Forest was looking for a new director to replace Marjorie Nicholson, and at the suggestion of Brian Monteith, Forest’s spokesman in Scotland with whom I was sharing an office in Edinburgh at the time, I applied.
I was invited to Forest’s office in Palace Street, Victoria, where I was ‘interviewed’ by Ralph and Marjorie over tea and sandwiches.
While Marjorie was reaching for her fags, Ralph was smoking his pipe and the smoke would drift up and disappear into the large air filtration unit in the ceiling panel above our heads.
A slightly eccentric looking figure, Ralph often wore a deerstalker and was never without his beloved pipe. Whether this was to disarm people, I don’t know.
In reality he had an exceptionally sharp mind and despite his generally equable nature there was a slight air of impatience about him.
His peerage, the first to be bestowed by Mrs Thatcher after she became prime minister in 1979, was in recognition of his work for the IEA, which he co-founded with Arthur Selsdon in 1956.
Selsdon was considered the more intellectual of the two. Ralph was the ‘hustler’, the man who went out and ‘sold’ the IEA’s free market ideas to politicians and journalists.
In those days free market economics were out of fashion, even among Conservatives, and it was 20 years before they were once more in vogue, courtesy of Margaret Thatcher via Keith Joseph and others.
Typically, Ralph chose to sit on the crossbenches in the Lords rather than be aligned with any one party. He valued his independence.
Either way, when I was eventually introduced to the person I knew only as Lord Harris of High Cross (described by the Guardian after his death as ‘A ramrod-erect military figure with a bristling moustache, spectacles, thinning hair, a loud laugh, [and] flamboyant waistcoats’), I assumed he must come from a ‘posh’ background.
Far from it. One of four children, Ralph was brought up by working class parents on a council estate in Tottenham, north London. He excelled academically, however, and went to Tottenham grammar school before going to Queens' College, Cambridge, where he achieved a first-class degree in economics.
Thereafter, according to another obituary:
He lectured at St Andrews University (1949-65) and stood as a Liberal Unionist parliamentary candidate at Kirkcaldy in 1951 and Edinburgh Central in 1955.
The IEA followed and in 1987 he added Forest to his portfolio of interests when he was appointed chairman, an honorary role for which he never received a penny.
He was however far more than a figurehead. In my experience he was game for just about anything.
On No Smoking Day 1999, at the age of 74, he agreed to lead a group of escapees - around 15 people - to Paris, which was then the ‘European capital of smoking’. They left on a Eurostar train from Waterloo station at 8.00am, returning to London over 14 hours later.
The following year, aged 75, he joined me in Scotland for the launch of Scottish Forest, a short-lived attempt by Forest to fully embrace devolution.
We began with a smoker-friendly breakfast fry-up in a Glasgow pub that was broadcast live, with interviews, on BBC Radio Scotland.
We then travelled to Edinburgh where we hosted a reception for MSPs and journalists at the appropriately named Oxygen Bar close to the Scottish Parliament.
Thereafter Ralph attended many Forest events including parties and PR events at Little Havana (off Leicester Square), Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, and the Groucho Club in Soho.
He was active in other ways too. In 1998 he co-wrote a book with Judith Hatton, who was a part-time researcher at Forest. It was called ‘Murder A Cigarette’ and according to the synopsis:
The aim of this book is not to encourage others to smoke, but to sort out fantasy from fact in the debate on the freedom of adult individuals to smoke - always with courtesy and considerations for others. The authors acknowledge smoking as a risk factor in cancer; but as only among several leading predispositions, including heredity, diet, personality, lifestyle, social class and location. They aim to expose the exaggeration and deception of the "medical mafia" and the "cancer establishment" and show "passive smoking" to be a bogus invention designed to stigmatise smokers.
In 2004, while we were campaigning against the smoking ban, he also wrote an essay, Smoking Out The Truth: A Challenge to the Chief Medical Officer’, that was disseminated to MPs and the media.
Ralph and I were subsequently invited to meet John Reid, Secretary of State for Health, and his senior adviser, Julian Le Grand (now Sir Julian), who agreed with us that the threat of passive smoking had been exaggerated.
This led, directly or indirectly, to Reid's infamous compromise – an exemption for pubs that didn't serve food – that was stubbed out when he was replaced as health secretary by Patricia Hewitt following the 2005 general election.
Up to and beyond his 80th birthday Ralph maintained a busy schedule, frequently visiting the IEA office in Westminster and sometimes popping into our office en route.
I was never under any illusion that the IEA was his first love, but he was always available whenever I needed help or advice.
Occasionally he would invite me to lunch or afternoon tea at the House of Lords, and I remember one or two dinners at his flat in Barnet in north London where he lived with his wife Jose (pronounced Josie) who died in 2017.
I remember too visiting them in their second home, a modest apartment in Eastbourne. It was a rather ugly building but the unobscured view of the sea through the large picture windows was magnificent and you could see why they spent so many weekends there.
We spoke on the phone quite often but it was always brief because he was invariably in a hurry. Emails were always signed off with the words ‘in haste’, and that rather summed him up.
News of Ralph’s death, albeit at the age of 81, was a shock because he seemed in relatively good health. His wife Jose, on the other hand, had spent six week in hospital in France the previous year.
(Ironically, that led to him giving up smoking, but that's another story.)
When he died, and despite his polarising political beliefs, the obituaries were kind to him. According to the Independent:
Ralph Harris was the most friendly and least lordly of peers. His easy manner, however, concealed his stature as one of the most influential figures of our age. Along with his fellow director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Arthur Seldon, he was a key figure in the revival of the doctrines of classical liberal economics which inspired the Thatcher revolution.
The Times wrote:
For three decades at the epicentre of free-market thinking, Ralph Harris was decisive in converting the British political consensus back to liberal economics. He did this chiefly by informing — and often inspiring — an ideological underpinning for Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph as they remodelled the Conservative Party after 1975.
The Economist described him as an 'economist and freedom-fighter' while The Telegraph took pleasure in noting that, while he was a director of Times Newspaper Holdings from 1988 to 2001, ‘he was a longstanding reader of, and writer for, the Daily Telegraph’.
Only the Guardian struck a slightly sour note, describing him as a ‘radical reactionary’ and the ‘high priest of the libertarian right, whose creed included full-blooded monetarism, the unleashing of market forces, sharp tax cuts, unrestricted Sunday trading, the castration of trade unions and the abolition of minimum wages, nationalised industries and inflation-proof pensions’.
The obits naturally focussed on his work with the IEA but they also mentioned his role with Forest.
The Financial Times described him as ‘an enthusiastic pipe-smoker … and an active campaigner against increasingly tough restrictions on the freedom to smoke’.
BBC News wrote:
Describing himself as a "lifelong pipe-man", he was an enthusiastic supporter of smokers' rights, writing numerous essays and even a book, Murder A Cigarette, in 1998.
He also campaigned against banning smoking in public places.
He once said: "A lot of people fulfil themselves through sucking at their pipes or smoking their fags. It's part of their personality."
‘In later years,’ commented The Times, ‘Harris was to be heard speaking out against plans to regulate smoking as often as he voiced his opposition to the spread and deepening of the EU.’
Ralph's funeral took place in Barnet, close to where he lived. In February 2007 there was also a memorial event at St John's Smith Square in Westminster to celebrate his life.
Organised by the IEA, speakers included Lord Howe (former Chancellor of the Exchequer), Lord Tebbit, Dr Edwin J Feulner Jr (Heritage Foundation), Professor Pascal Salin (Université Paris IX-Dauphine), Alberto Mingardi (Instituto Bruno Leoni) Andrew Alexander (Daily Mail), and Simon Heffer (Daily Telegraph).
Neil Hamilton, the former MP who was forced to resign as a government minister following the ‘cash for questions’ scandal in the Nineties, also spoke. They were friends and Ralph had supported Hamilton in adversity, as true friends do.
He deserved his send-off and although many years have passed since he died his memory lives on. In fact, I find it hard to believe it was 18 years ago because it seems only yesterday that he was breezing into the Forest office before rushing off to his next appointment.
The good humour and fun I remember is all the more remarkable given two significant tragedies in his life - the premature death of two of his three children, both of them in adulthood.
He never spoke about it (not to me, at least) but it demonstrated, I think, his strength of character that he never let personal sorrow overwhelm him.
I didn’t know him long (seven-and-a-half years) but throughout that period he was enormously supportive, and for that I’m truly grateful.
Below: Lord Harris of High Cross (second left) with John Farquhar Munro, Lib Dem MSP; Charles Maclean, spokesman for Scottish Forest; and Brian Monteith MSP and former spokesman for Forest in Scotland
Monday, December 23, 2024 at 13:18 
