Tribute to Lord Lipsey: 'Extremely bright, though never arrogant with it'
Lord Lipsey: 21 April 1948 – 1 July 2025 | Image courtesy of UK Parliament
5 min read
A former special adviser, journalist and psephologist, David Lipsey was charming, independent and insightful. A man of remarkably diverse interests, he lived life to the full
David Lipsey and his wife, Margaret, lived in the Welsh Marshes where they had established their own little piece of heaven. Tragically, last week David drowned while swimming in the Wye, a river he had loved.
David and I first met at Oxford in 1967 – though our birthdays were only 10 months apart, I was two academic years his senior and campaigned very hard, against some determined opposition, for David to become chairman of the Democratic Labour Club.
Though hard-working, he was never a swot
He was extremely bright – brighter than me (he gained a PPE first, when firsts were something of a rarity), though he was never arrogant with it. There was however always a quirkiness in his considerable charm that remained with him for the rest of his life. Though hard-working, he was never a swot, always displaying a spirit of buoyant joie de vivre. As life proceeded, he developed remarkably diverse enthusiasms from opera and ballet to greyhound racing and the Tote.
His first job was in industrial relations, in which as a researcher I had also chosen to specialise. It seemed the central question of the times: Labour’s battles over incomes policy and “In Place of Strife” dominated our political discourse. In August 1970, David was appointed by our much beloved and sorely missed Giles Radice as one of the original staffers (alongside my colleague Dianne Hayter) in the newly founded research department of the (then) General and Municipal Workers Union.
In the spring of 1972, David moved even closer to Labour’s centre of power. The Rowntree Trust had decided to fund two full time special adviser posts (known infamously as ‘chocolate soldiers’) for two leading members of the shadow cabinet: Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins, who as the-then deputy leader had first pick. Roy chose Matthew Oakeshott over David on the grounds that he proved the more aggressive croquet player in their ‘interviews’ at the Jenkins’ East Hendred home: this apocryphal story may have some truth in it as there was very little to choose between them in intellect and political outlook.
It was a piece of good luck for David. He loved Crosland and for Crosland he probably became the son he never had. Today Crosland is criticised for his indecisiveness as a minister and whether the social democratic philosophy he set out in his The Future of Socialism has continuing relevance. But Crosland, the man, was unforgettable and with David, I was a fellow hero-worshipper.
For example, at a 1973 Labour conference Fabian ‘tea’ (in those days, a proper afternoon tea was served) in the immediate aftermath of a heated debate (on the National Executive’s recommendation that the next Labour government should nationalise the 20 leading companies in Britain) Crosland was the guest speaker. Without a note, with the faultless clarity of argument of a Maynard Keynes or James Meade, and dry wit, Crosland, piece by piece, destroyed this Bennite proposition on classic social democratic grounds. David and I were in total awe.
The tragedy in David’s political life was Crosland’s sudden death in February 1977. Jim Callaghan was thought to be lining him up to take over as chancellor with Denis Healey as foreign secretary following gladly in the footsteps of his own apprentice master, Ernest Bevin. After a few weeks of mutual incompatibility with Crosland’s successor David Owen, David Lipsey found refuge in Bernard Donoughue’s No 10 Policy Unit, where he made himself an expert on polling.
He also drafted Labour ‘s 1979 manifesto, which gained infamy not for its sensible contents but for the fact that it was presented to the Clause V meeting (the joint meeting of the cabinet and national executive committee to agree the manifesto which is required under Labour’s constitution) without any prior reference to the NEC’s home policy committee chaired by Tony Benn.
David and I were equally despairing of what happened to Labour after 1979. I left for the SDP in loyalty to my boss Bill Rodgers. David temporarily resigned his Labour membership but did not join the SDP, a result I suspect of the rift between Crosland and Jenkins that had occurred over Europe in the early 1970s.
David went on for two decades to be a successful journalist in a variety of distinguished organs, admired by his colleagues for his insight and independence of view, but as far away from the classic newshound as anyone could imagine.
New Labour created an opportunity for his return to politics. Tony Blair awarded David a well-deserved peerage in 1999. He served with distinction on three government commissioned inquiries.
On social care, he declined to accept the majority view that the only way the problem could be solved was by more “tax and spend”, a view that has not lost its relevance with the passage of time. With his old No 10 Policy Unit colleague, Gavyn Davies, he supported a significant increase in the BBC licence fee.
As a member of the Jenkins electoral reform inquiry, the reservations he had held about Roy in his Croslandite past completely fell away in his admiration for Roy’s brilliance of character, political acuity and supreme drafting skills.
David was never appointed a minister in the Lords but, given that he had operated at a very senior political level, he may not have enjoyed it.
He always saw himself as more radical social democrat than Blair and Gordon Brown. But as a writer, lover of the Marches, sports enthusiast and man of culture – and despite a final decade of ill health – he lived life to the full, literally to the very end.
Lord Liddle is a Labour peer
