In fond memory of Russell Lewis, a “Thatcherite before she was”

Some sad news.

Russell Lewis, one of two non-executive directors of Forest, has died. He was 95.

In recent years Russell’s advanced age and the threat of Covid kept him at home so the last time I saw him was at the gala dinner to mark Forest’s 40th anniversary in July 2019.

According to his son Dan, with whom he is pictured above on the terrace at Boisdale of Canary Wharf, it was one of the last times his father went out. After the event Dan wrote to thank us, adding “It was a very happy occasion”, which was lovely to hear.

Born in 1926, William Russell Lewis was a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph, then the Daily Mail, acting general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and director of the Conservative Political Centre.

In the early Nineties he joined the board of Forest as a non-executive director. The invitation came from the late Lord Harris of High Cross who was chairman from 1987 until his death in 2006. I’ve been director of Forest since 1999 and we owe much of our stability to Russell and his fellow non-executive director, John Burton.

In meetings Russell was a man of relatively few words but he was always listening intently and when he did comment or suggest something everyone took note. In spite of his advancing years he attended as many Forest events as he could, including several Freedom Dinners at Boisdale of Canary Wharf.

Like Ralph and John Burton, smokers’ rights was one of many issues Russell took an interest in but it was not his principal interest. Like them he was a free marketeer who enjoyed a long association with the Institute of Economic Affairs and was acting general director before the appointment, I think, of John Blundell who preceded the current director-general Mark Littlewood.

Russell was also a member of The Freedom Association Council, a body that – when I was editing Freedom Today from 2000-2002 – included Vice-Admiral Sir Louis Le Bailly OBE, Winston Churchill (grandson of the great man), Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Professor Patrick Minford and other distinguished names.

Today Russell’s writing is difficult to find online because his working life was almost entirely pre-internet. Also, given his longevity, very few of his contemporaries are still with us to add their pennyworth.

Politically Russell was eurosceptic decades before Brexit. According to the Guardian he was also a ‘climate change sceptic’ who told a fringe meeting at the 2007 Conservative conference in Blackpool, “Penguins are very adaptable creatures and certain penguins are flourishing in the tropical Galapagos islands."

It was easy for the Guardian to poke fun but there was far more to Russell’s speech than a sentence taken out of context, as I explained here:

The meeting - entitled 'Let Cooler Heads Prevail' - was organised by The Freedom Association and chaired by TFA chairman Roger Helmer MEP, who spoke at [the Forest] reception the previous evening. It tackled the thorny issue of climate change and provided a platform for those of us who are sceptical about global warming or, at the very least, the impact of global warming.

I also quoted a passage from Russell's speech that will sound familiar if you read my post ('The ice age cometh') the other week. In Russell's words:

What started me on the sceptical path was the family likeness of this scare to so many other scares, which have turned up in the last few decades. Only 40 years ago there was great alarm about the imminence of an ice age, which would kill billions of people …

We were also told, back in the Seventies that there would be mass starvation through overpopulation and food shortages. The whole world population was apparently fated to die of cancer due to DDT. The forests, we were told, were destined to die because of acid rain, at a time when in America they were expanding. At the same time there was the angst about depleting resources. President Carter no less said that we would run out of oil by 1990. All these doomsday forecasts were completely wrong.

Warming (no pun intended) to his theme Russell subsequently wrote an article ('Doom-mongers spell trouble for freedom') for The Free Society website that Forest launched in 2007 to address other freedom-related issues.

The website is no longer online but in the context of today's eco-wars it's a fascinating read. I may post it in full at a later date but this is how it began:

Global warming poses a worse danger than terrorism, said Tony Blair. By the century's end Antarctica will be the only habitable place on the planet, said chief government scientist Sir David King. It will result in millions, billions of deaths said the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.

Other "experts" have joined in with threats of rising seas eventually drowning London. Yet others claim that rising temperatures will bring a spread of malaria or perhaps even contemporaneously diverting the Gulf Stream, making England as cold as Siberia. It's an old trick of tyrants to get people to do what you want: scare them to death!

Russell was neither scared to death nor scared to speak out. Nor did his disillusionment with what became the European Union stop him visiting France on holiday every year with his wife. (Why should it?)

In 2002, when I was editor of Freedom Today, The Freedom Association magazine, I asked him to write an article that could be published to coincide with Bastille Day, the national day of France that is celebrated every year on July 14th.

I knew that despite his love of France (and a good party!), Russell was no fan of the French Revolution:

France's leading revolutionaries thought they were modern and enlightened but at a time when the world was already being transformed by exciting new technologies they showed no interest in science. Thus the brilliant pioneer chemist Lavoisier, the discoverer of the composition of air and the role of oxygen, was condemned to death along with 28 farmers.

He asked for a reprieve so he could conduct some important experiments. The president of the revolutionary tribunal dismissed his appeal with the comment, 'The Republic has no need for scientists.' So much for intellectual freedom!

He also noted that:

The revolutionaries had the same contempt for economics as for science ... They despised commerce and executed many more merchants than aristocrats. They did not understand the arguments for a free economy and free trade at a time when Britain's prime minister William Pitt gladly deferred to Adam Smith as his mentor.

Although many of his contemporaries were no longer alive, Russell’s 90th birthday celebration at the Carlton Club, where he was a member, was attended, if I remember, by the likes of Eamonn Butler and Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute, Simon Richards of The Freedom Association and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont (now Lord Lamont of Lerwick).

It was a very jolly evening and what was clear was the affection and respect in which he was held.

Since I drafted this Dan Lewis has sent me some additional information about his father. If this doesn’t deserve a more formal obituary I don’t know what does. For example:

In 1951 Russell was a founding member of the Bow Group, ‘Britain’s oldest conservative think tank’, becoming chairman in 1958-59.

He was Maggie's first biographer, writing ‘Margaret Thatcher: A Personal and Political Biography’ in 1975. “He was really a Thatcherite before she was,” says Dan.

In 1978 he wrote Tony Benn: A Critical Biography.

He also wrote a book that effectively predicted Britain’s service industry. According to Dan:

“In the 1970s, when received opinion believed manufacturing was the only industry worth having, he wrote ‘The New Service Society’ which was really about the rise and great potential of the service sector to enrich people's everyday lives.”

A 1971 paper ‘Rome or Brussels?’ for the Institute of Economic Affairs “warned of the danger of a Europe that chose bureaucratic centralism (Brussels) over competing nation states (Rome).”

Yet he also led a campaign in favour of Britain joining the Common Market.

Twenty years later Russell ran the Maastricht Referendum Campaign, “working closely with [prominent eurosceptic] Bill Cash”.

“As membership [of the Common Market] became more onerous and socialist,” says Dan, “he became increasingly sceptical. Joining the Common Market was a liberal idea at the time because they were all far more pro-market than the UK. How things changed.”

Last but not least, he notes that his father “was actually in uniform at the end of WW2 on a boat to invade Japan … So he was glad when they dropped the bomb.”

Thanks, Dan, and I haven’t even mentioned the two joke books Russell wrote!