Paul Channon

Channon was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Richard Wood, (later Lord Holderness), the Minister of Power, from 1959 to 1960,[4] and then to R. A. Butler from 1961 to 1964 (while Butler was Home Secretary, First Secretary of State and then Foreign Secretary).[2] Channon's father had once held the same position.[1][2] Channon was elected to the executive of the 1922 Committee in 1965.[2] He was one of few Conservative MPs to support the 1965 bill that ended capital punishment, and also opposed the unilateral declaration of independence by Ian Smith's Rhodesia.[3]

In opposition, Conservative leader Edward Heath appointed Channon as a spokesman on public building and works in 1965, and then on arts in 1967.[1] He served as a junior minister in the government led by Heath from 1970 to 1974, as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in 1970, then as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the new Department of the Environment from 1970 to 1972, briefly as Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office for six months in 1972, and then Minister of Housing and Construction from 1972 to 1974.[4] Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw met IRA leader Sean MacStiofain and other Republicans at Channon's house in Chelsea on 7 July 1972.[2] The talks ended in failure, and the IRA bombed Belfast repeatedly on Bloody Friday just two weeks later. After the February 1974 general election, Channon joined Heath's shadow cabinet as environment spokesman. His services were dispensed with by Margaret Thatcher when she became leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975.[2]

Channon joined the Conservative delegation to the Council of Europe and Western European Union in 1976, and considered standing in the first UK elections to the European Parliament in 1979, but failed to win the nomination for the North-East Essex seat.[1]

He became Minister of State at the Civil Service Department when the Conservatives returned to power in 1979, and joined the Privy Council in 1980. After the department was abolished in 1981, he became Minister of the Arts. The call from 10 Downing Street came while he was swimming in the sea near his villa on the island of Mustique.[2] He became Minister of State for Trade at the Department of Trade and Industry following the 1983 general election. He took charge of the department for two short periods, after Cecil Parkinson resigned following the Sara Keays affair in 1983, and while his successor, Norman Tebbit, recovered from his injuries sustained in the Brighton bombing in 1984. Channon became President of the Board of Trade and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry on 24 January 1986, after Leon Brittan resigned following the Westland affair.

Channon's time as Trade and Industry Secretary was marred in several ways. A major issue of the day was a takeover by the Guinness group using an inflated stock value via third parties – the Guinness share-trading fraud during its takeover of Distillers. As a member of the Guinness family, Channon had to stand aside from any investigation into the affair as he would have been accused of a conflict of interest.[2] In addition, proposed sales of troubled nationalised carmarkers British Leyland to General Motors and of Austin Rover to Ford also fell through.[2] Leyland Trucks was later sold to DAF.[1] He blocked a proposed merger of Tate and Lyle with British Sugar and a takeover bid for Plessey by GEC.[4] Channon was later alleged to have been involved in the government's secret supply of weapons of mass destruction to Iraq.[5]

Channon was appointed Secretary of State for Transport on 13 June 1987. His tenure as Transport Secretary was blighted by several major transport disasters: 31 died in the King's Cross fire on 18 November 1987; 35 were killed when three trains crashed near Britain's busiest railway station in the Clapham Junction rail crash on 12 December 1988; 270 died when Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down by a bomb over Scottish town of Lockerbie in the Lockerbie Disaster on 21 December 1988; and 44 died when a British Midland plane crashed beside the M1 motorway in the Kegworth air disaster on 8 January 1989. He was roughly treated in the House of Commons by Labour's transport spokesman, John Prescott, who pilloried him for underinvestment in the rail network, and for taking a family holiday to Mustique shortly after the Lockerbie disaster.[2]

However, it was an unlucky coincidence which led to Channon's sacking in July 1989 as Transport Secretary. British investigative journalist, Paul Foot, in a 1994 article for the London Review of Books, described what happened:

The American investigative columnist, Jack Anderson, has had some scoops in his time but none more significant than his revelation – in January 1990 – that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to 'cool it' on the subject. On what seems to have been the very same day [in March 1989], perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher's Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five prominent political correspondents at a lunch at the Garrick Club. It was agreed that anything said at the lunch was 'on strict lobby terms' – that is, for the journalists only, not their readers. Channon then announced that the Dumfries and Galloway Police – the smallest police force in Britain – had concluded a brilliant criminal investigation into the Lockerbie crash. They had found who was responsible and arrests were expected before long. So sensational was the revelation that at least one of the five journalists broke ranks; and the news that the Lockerbie villains would soon be behind bars in Scotland was divulged to the public. Channon, still playing the lobby game, promptly denied that he was the source of the story. Denounced in a front page story in the Daily Mirror as a "liar", he did not sue or complain. A few months later he was quietly sacked. Thatcher, of course, could not blame her loyal minister for his indiscretion, which coincided so unluckily with her instructions from the White House.[6]

Channon was replaced by Cecil Parkinson on 24 July 1989.

Channon harboured hopes of becoming the fourth member of his family to become Speaker of the House of Commons,[1][2] but he withdrew from the election to replace Bernard Weatherill in 1992. He later served as chairman of the House of Commons Finance and Services Committee and chairman of the Transport Select Committee.

He retired from Parliament at the 1997 general election and was created a life peer as Baron Kelvedon, of Ongar in the County of Essex, on 11 June 1997,[7] named after the family's house at Kelvedon Hall.[1]

Outside politics, he was a member of the board of directors of Guinness, and served with the Guinness Trust.[1]