Background

Julian Michael Gordon Critchley was born on December 8, 1930, in Chelsea, England, the United Kingdom, to an eminent neurologist, Macdonald Critchley, C.B.E. and his first wife, midwife Edna Audleth (née Morris). Critchley was brought up in Swiss Cottage, North London, and in Shropshire.

Education

Critchley attended Brockhurst School, a preparatory school in Church Stretton. Critchley went on to Shrewsbury, where he encountered Michael Heseltine who, though more than two years younger, would become a fast friend. After they had both gone on to Pembroke College, Oxford (in Critchley's case, with a year at the Sorbonne beforehand).

Career

After Oxford, Critchley went into advertising and public relations. By 1956 he was a senior executive with Lintas, but he still aimed at a political career. He was elected to the Young Conservatives National Committee, and within three years was in the Commons - at 29, the youngest member - after a dramatic victory over a former Labour minister, Arthur Bottomley, at Rochester and Chatham.

Increasingly, Critchley has sought after to grace Tory functions, but, with a courage rare in a new member, he soon demonstrated his independence in backing causes that were anathema to most Tories. He joined with the veteran Labour campaigner Fenner Brockway in sponsoring a Bill outlawing racial discrimination; he campaigned for homosexual law reform and the abolition of capital punishment.

He became increasingly repelled by what he saw as the social elitism of Harold Macmillan's Tory party and was a passionate pro-European. One of Edward Heath's staunchest backbench allies, he supported him in the bitter internal party feud over the abolition of resale price maintenance.

"The Tory party is not the party of the small shopkeeper," Critchley declared a remark that may have contributed to his defeat at the general election of 1964. He stood again at Rochester and Chatham in 1966, but unsuccessfully. In the political wilderness, Critchley continued campaigning on the party's Left, becoming chairman of the Bow Group in 1966.

His search for a winnable seat for long proved unavailing; effectively blackballed by the Whips, he received no help from Central Office. Then, shortly before the election of 1970, and to universal astonishment, he was selected for Aldershot and North Hants. The retired generals and brigadiers in the constituency were ready to cast a blind eye to his idiosyncratic views on homosexuals and hanging because he charmed their wives, and took a strong line on defense.

Critchley had not cooked up this policy for the Aldershot selectors: in his maiden speech in 1959, he had urged higher priority for conventional weapons. His good reputation with the Senior Service at Rochester and Chatham also stood him in good stead. Over the years, he warned against Western Europe's over-dependence on American military power, advocating the reintroduction of conscription and the creation of an Anglo-French nuclear partnership.

However, the going was not always easy in his Aldershot constituency. He enjoyed writing of constituency meetings; when the black rule in Africa came up, "it was so emotive an issue that even the labradors in the audience were moved to discordancy". He twice faced attempts to deselect him. The second effort actually came after "That Bloody Woman" was dethroned. But he survived the wrath of her supporters.

Critchley was a noted bon viveur, though often financially hard-pressed. It was mostly to earn money that he began to write, and from 1962 to 1964 he was a director of the Spectator. Another lifeline came when The Daily Telegraph appointed him a restaurant critic. In his early sixties, damage to his spine, caused by his limp and worsened by an operation that went disastrously wrong, left him increasingly crippled.

Eventually, he was wheelchair-bound and only able to write by using a portable word processor while lying on his side. He endured pain with fortitude and humor. He proved a resolute supporter of John Major and was always diligent in his constituents' interests.

In spite of his ill health - to add to his troubles, he was found to have prostate cancer in 1992 - he made determined efforts to vote in important divisions, using a rule permitting a sick member's vote to be counted if he was in a car within the Commons' precincts.

His autobiography, A Bag of Boiled Sweets, published in 1994, was a success, revealing his ability to write beyond the world of politics and detailing his boyhood successes in the boxing ring. His most ambitious political book was Heseltine: The Unauthorised Biography. It was an interesting, rather than a penetrating, study of the Conservative power-broker to whom Critchley would have committed his own fortunes had he followed a more conventional political career.

In 1997 Critchley was obliged by his health to retire from Parliament. He went to live at Ludlow and declared that he would not vote Conservative in the constituency because the Tory MP held Thatcherite views.

Achievements

• At 29, Critchley became the youngest member of the House of Commons. He was knighted at the behest of John Major in 1995.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Bag of Boiled Sweets

    (Julian Critchley, who first became an MP in 1959, recount...)

    1994
  • Westminster Blues 1981
  • Palace of Varieties 1983
  • Heseltine The Unauthorised Biography 1987

Politics

In 1953 Critchley was part of a team of Oxford undergraduates lobbying Vickers shipyard workers against nationalization; the others were Michael Heseltine, Guy Arnold, and Martin Morton.

In youth, Critchley showed clear traces of robust independence and a commitment to Tory liberalism. For much of his political life, he was at odds with the Whips' Office, sometimes for his views and sometimes for the cavalier way he approached the serious business of Westminster politics.

He had little affection for Thatcherite politics or its leading practitioners. During the John Major years, he was happily reconciled to mainstream Conservatism, believing that Major as prime minister should resist any drift to the right, and avowing that Richard Ryder was the best chief whip he had known.

Critchley entered parliament in the 1959 general election as a Member of Parliament for Rochester and Chatham. He was then aged 28, but having captured this marginal seat he lost it again at the election in 1964. He was returned for Aldershot in the 1970 election and held the seat until 1997 when he did not seek re-election.

He was a liberal Tory, supporting one-nation social policies, membership of the European Community, and a defense policy based on NATO and a nuclear strategy.

Critchley was considered to be on the left-wing of the Conservative Party (one of the "wets" in Thatcherite terminology) and never attained ministerial rank. He became identified as a prominent Tory critic of Margaret Thatcher. In 1980 he sparked controversy by writing an anonymous article in The Observer signed "by a Tory", in which he criticized Thatcher's "A level economics" and called her "didactic, tart and obstinate". He was later forced to admit authorship. He also memorably referred to Thatcher as "the great she-elephant" and claimed responsibility for the currency of the phrase "one of us", which she used privately to refer to any colleague whom she saw as loyal and supportive of her policies. (It was used by Hugo Young as the title of his biography of Thatcher.) Critchley was, however, supportive of Thatcher's stance at the time of the Falklands War.

Personality

A shy, sensitive boy, Critchley was much bullied at Brockhurst preparatory school, where he developed a lifelong phobia of water as a result of being constantly ducked on the end of a rope by a master who believed it was the way to teach timid pupils how to swim.

Interests

• Politicians

  John Major

• Sport & Clubs

  boxing

Connections

Critchley was married twice and had four children.

Father:

Macdonald Critchley

Mother:

Edna Audleth Critchley

Friend:

Michael Heseltine

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001