Background

A third child and second of three sons of Lord McAlpine of Moffat, and a great-grandson of “Concrete Bob” McAlpine, who built the West Highland Railway and founded the family construction company, Robert Alistair McAlpine was born by caesarean section on May 14, 1942 at the Dorchester Hotel, which his family built and owned — as a baby he received his first bottle via room service. His mother, Molly, was a powerful woman who smoked cigars and believed that the only real education was to be had in travel. This was just as well since, being dyslexic (a condition diagnosed only when he was in his twenties), young Alistair did badly at school.

Education

Alistair McAlpine attended private boys’ school in England. He droped out of public school Stowe with three O-levels.

Career

Following family tradition, Alistair McAlpine started working as a timekeeper on McAlpine’s South Bank site in London. Working long hours and being covered in dust meant that he was never invited to Society balls; but in any case he preferred the company of Irish navvies and the Bohemian friends he met in Soho pubs.

McAlpine started making serious money on his own account at 22, when he learned that the government of Western Australia was about to privatise road-building. He flew out immediately, concluded that road-building prospects were poor, but decided to go into hotels instead. After building various properties in Perth, he moved up to Broome, an old pearl-fishing station on the north-west coast, and started developing it as a holiday resort, complete with zoo, cinema and international airport.

Encouraged by a friend, the art dealer Leslie Waddington, he acquired a knack for spotting talented artists — for instance, the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko — well before they became famous. He therefore was able to buy their works before they became prohibitively expensive. Apart from fine art, the objects of his desires included police truncheons, snowdrops, rare breeds of chicken, Renaissance tapestries, curiosities such as five-legged lambs in formaldehyde, shells and ties.

As a collector, McAlpine seemed to buy more for the pleasure of having things pass through his hands than of owning them permanently. When his interests changed he gave things away or sold them; the Tate and other galleries were among the beneficiaries. In the late 1980s he had a shop in Cork Street where he sold everything from busts of Roman emperors to prehistoric artifacts.

In the 1970s McAlpine was a fervent believer in the Common Market and was treasurer of the “Britain in Europe” campaign for the 1975 referendum. But he was not then active politically, and at one stage members of Harold Wilson’s kitchen cabinet even thought of offering him a job as a Labour Party fundraiser.

Everything changed in 1975 after he met Margaret Thatcher, who had recently supplanted Ted Heath as leader of the Conservative Party. They hit it off immediately. He admired her forceful radicalism; she appreciated his garrulous charm and air of business efficiency. He complied also with her request that he become the party’s (unpaid) treasurer. The appointment of a 32-year-old millionaire with unconventional tastes did not go down well with some of the more dignified members of the party’s treasurers’ department, who were soon shunted aside. Yet McAlpine did not spend much time at Central Office itself, being much more effective outside it.

At his office in London, journalists were regaled with gossip and generous lashings of Chateau Latour, and he became a favourite of even such papers as The Independent and The Guardian. He would lunch prospective donors (and journalists) at the Club. Money was never discussed directly, but the follow-up letters left recipients in little doubt about what was expected and the funds poured in. In 1975, the year before McAlpine arrived, the Conservatives raised about £1.5 million. By the time of the 1979 election, it was £4 million, and by 1990 at least £9 million. In between McAlpine was thought to have raised about £100 million.

During the 1980s McAlpine’s country home, West Green, a handsome 18th-century house near Basingstoke, Hampshire, became the venue for lavish dinners (often cooked by the host himself) at which prominent Tories would rub shoulders with artists, dealers, writers, Bohemians and even stalwart socialists. He was sometimes criticised for the secrecy of Conservative finances and his willingness to accept donations from rich foreign businessmen such as the Hong Hong millionaire Li Ka Shing, Mohamed Fayed and Asil Nadir. But there was never a serious whiff of scandal. In 1993, after Nadir had fled to northern Cyprus to escape prosecution for fraud, he claimed he would reveal favours promised by McAlpine in return for his cash.

McAlpine was deputy chairman of the party from 1979 to 1983. His raffish, anarchic streak meant that he liked Cecil Parkinson but loathed Parkinson’s successor John Gummer, whom he considered sanctimonious and dull. Such was his influence with Margaret Thatcher that he was said to have engineered Gummer’s rapid replacement by Norman Tebbit.

In 1984, on Margaret Thatcher’s recommendation, he was created a life peer. That year, when the IRA blew up the Grand Hotel, Brighton, during the Conservative conference, McAlpine was staying in the suite above the Prime Minister’s. Woken by the explosion but otherwise unhurt, he immediately set to work to address the practicalities of the situation. As stunned survivors wandered around in their nightclothes, he called the top brass of Marks & Spencer and got them to open their Brighton store early so that people could be properly dressed for the conference that day. His Hampshire home became a refuge for several shell-shocked survivors.

In 1987 McAlpine had to have a major coronary bypass operation, and in 1990 he gave up the treasurer’s job. His name was on IRA hit lists and, ostensibly for reasons of safety and tax, he decided to move to Monte Carlo and Venice. He took almost nothing with him from Britain, having put all his English possessions up for sale at Sotheby’s so as to start afresh. Although McAlpine described his decision to leave Britain as a matter of personal whim, there were also financial considerations. In 1989, after an Australian pilots’ strike lasting six months, his Australian tourism venture, in which he had invested £250 million, collapsed, costing him much of his personal fortune.

In the 1990s he turned to writing. He was the author of some dozen books, including two volumes of memoirs, guides to the world’s museums, and mischievous political parodies. He also wrote a regular column in The World of Interiors and contributed widely to national newspapers. Late in his life McAlpine was falsely accused of paedophilia, in a scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of the BBC Director General, George Entwistle. The allegations of child abuse began to swirl around McAlpine in 2012, following an edition of Newsnight which claimed to expose “a senior Tory.” Lord McAlpine was swiftly “identified” on social media as the Tory in question, only for the whole story to be equally swiftly debunked.

His wife nursed him through two triple bypass operations. The second of these, in 1999, nearly killed McAlpine and he spent a month in a coma on a life-support machine. McAlpine died on January 17, 2014 at his home in Italy, aged 71.

Achievements

• Alistair McAlpine was at one time one of the most powerful figures in the Conservative Party. He became one of Margaret Thatcher's closest and most devoted advisers and Conservative Party treasurer throughout her period in office. She made him a life peer, Baron McAlpine of West Green in Hampshire, in 1984. He is remembered as perhaps the most effective political fundraiser of his generation, helping to bankroll three successful general election campaigns.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Ruthless Leader: Three Classics of Strategy and Power

    (In each classic, the author builds on his experiences to ...)

    2000
  • The New Machiavelli: The Art of Politics in Business

    (The New Machiavelli mines Machiavelli's The Prince for th...)

    1997
  • The Servant

    (Lord McAlpine observed the inner workings of political po...)

    1993
  • How to Run with a Hip Replacement

    (This book explores how you can run without jarring your h...)

    2013
  • Collecting and Display

    (The book examines the history and psychology of collectin...)

    1998
  • Once a Jolly Bagman: Memoirs

    (The sparkling memoir of Alistar McAlpine,scion of the con...)

    1997
  • Adventures of a Collector 2002
  • Letters to a young politician: From his Uncle 1995
  • Bagman to Swagman - Tales of Broome, the North - West and Other Australian Adventures 1999
  • The Essential Guide to Collectibles 2001

Religion

Alistair McAlpine experienced a deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, emerged declaring that he felt “more casual about life” and, months later, left the family home.

Politics

Lord McAlpine of West Green was an early supporter and confidant of Margaret Thatcher and a Conservative Party treasurer in the 1980s. Yet by nature a dilettante, he did not become a significant political figure. Nevertheless, the columnist Alan Watkins once described McAlpine as being “fundamentally anti-Conservative.” During the Thatcher years, an invitation to his lavish parties at the annual Conservative Party conference was a sign of high political favour. He enjoyed fundraising for the Conservative party, and his personal devotion to the woman he called “the most magnificent” Margaret Thatcher was absolute. But politics per se never really engaged his attention. McAlpine's personal political views were varied and included Euroscepticism, support for electric cars and the decriminalisation of all drugs.

Views

Alistair McAlpine was mischievously fascinated by the mechanisms of power (among other things he penned a tongue-in-cheek updating of Machiavelli’s The Prince), and relished the gossip and intrigue of high politics. But he was impatient with the arts of negotiation and compromise; and a low boredom threshold coupled with a subversive streak made him disdainful of the sort of party loyalist on whom all the leaders must rely.

Yet he himself admitted that there was truth in the accusation of dilettantism that was often levelled against him. This applied not only to possessions but also to his relationships, as major changes in his life sometimes entailed equally dramatic changes in his domestic arrangements.

Quotations: “I keep changing my life, houses and relationships. I reinvent myself every few years. My first marriage lasted 15 years and this one [to Romilly] 20. It’s hardly into bed and out the other side. There was a great deal of love. But there comes a point when life is just a habit, and I’m rather against habits. I just didn’t want to carry on.”

Membership

McAlpine’s love for the arts was not limited to collecting: he was a member of the Arts Council; chairman of the Theatre Investment Fund; trustee of the Royal Opera House; and a director of the Institute for Contemporary Arts.

Personality

At heart Alistair McAlpine was an 18th-century amateur, a collector of art and of garden implements, of wooden statues, stuffed birds, old cushions, Turkish carpets, gossip — and people.

Physical Characteristics: Alistair McAlpine was forced to stop smoking in 1987, after a seven hour heart bypass operation, complications from which led to him having a tracheotomy and difficulty speaking.

Interests

• arts, horticulture, aviculture, agriculture

• Politicians

  Margaret Thatcher

• Artists

  Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Jackson Pollock, Sidney Nolan, William Turnbull, Naum Gabo, Michael Bolus

Connections

When Alistair McAlpine's first marriage, to Sarah Baron, collapsed shortly after he became treasurer of the Conservative Party, his disabled mother hit him over the head with her walking stick. For years, his two daughters from the marriage never spoke to him. In 1980 he married, secondly, his political secretary Romilly Hobbs, who became a glamorous and popular hostess during the Thatcher years, bore him another daughter and nursed him through two triple bypass operations. After an acrimonious divorce from Romilly on the grounds of his adultery, in 2002 he married Athena Malpas, a glamorous brunette three decades his junior.

Father:

Edwin McAlpine

Robert Edwin McAlpine, grandson of Sir Robert McAlpine, 1st Baronet, was a British construction magnate who headed Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd.

Mother:

Ella Mary Gardner

Spouse:

Athena Malpas

ex-spouse:

Sarah Baron

Brother:

William McAlpine

Sir William Hepburn McAlpine, 6th Baronet, was a British businessman who was director of the construction company Sir Robert McAlpine.

Brother:

David McAlpine

Sister:

Patricia McAlpine

ex-spouse:

Romilly Hobbs

Daughter:

Jane McAlpine

Daughter:

Victoria McAlpine

Daughter:

Skye McAlpine