(05-01-2014 12:51 )4evadionne Wrote: 1981 - London: Margaret Thatcher sacks Norman St. John Stevas as Leader of the Commons; Francis Pym takes over.
Despite his quintessentially English double-barrelled name (technically triple, as his mother was already double-barrelled herself!), his public school and Oxbridge University education and upper-class accent, Norman St. John Stevas was in fact the product of a Greek hotelier father and an Irish mother.
Born in 1929 he was a brilliant scholar, obtaining degrees at both Cambridge and Oxford. At his age of just 23 he was lecturing in law at Southampton University, by the age of 26 he was a tutor at Christ's (and later Merton) College Oxford and at just 28 was a visiting professor at the University of California.
He had been President of the Cambridge Union as an undergraduate and had unsuccessfully stood for Parliament in the 1951 General Election when just 22. In 1964 he was elected as MP for Chelmsford which he represented for the next 23 years. In 1973 he had his first post as a junior minister at the DES for the last few months of Ted Heath's regime and was shadow education minister after the Conservatives lost power in 1974.
When Mrs Thatcher came to power Stevas entered the cabinet as Leader of the House whilst serving simultaneously as Arts Minister. His constitutional knowledge was colossal and he was largely responsible for the setting up of Select Committees so that ministers could be called to account. However, Stevas had the misfortune to underestimate her ruthlessness: he was the one who had first described Thatcher as "the Blessed Margaret" or "the Leaderene" and the aged Lord Thorneycroft, brought back from retirement as party chairman, as "a public monument on whom the prime minister has slapped a preservation order" and this antagonised a woman not known for a sense of humour, leading to him being the first of the Tory "wets" to be purged.
In 1987, with Thatcher set to win a third term, he realised that he had no chance of returning to office and accepted a peerage as Lord St-John of Fawsley.
He devoted much of his time to the Arts. He served as Chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission from 1985 to 1999 but his tenure was wracked by controversy. It was hoped that his appointment would revitalise and popularise the Commission, which had not even produced an annual report for many years. Stevas succeeded in "inject[ing] a bit of panache and excitement" into the Commission. However it also became a mouthpiece for Lord St John's own views and preferences (most prominently in the annual Building of the Year award). Lord St John adorned his office with paintings from national collections, documents were presented in red boxes and he was served by a chauffeur and ex-civil servants, in accommodation more lavish than that of most secretaries of state: prompting one commentator to comment that "...if he cannot have power, he must have the trappings". This was all criticised in a savage government review by Sir Geoffrey Chipperfield.
The Commission strongly criticised the plans for the Millennium Wheel on London's South Bank even though three of the Commissioners were enthusiastic about it. After an ill-tempered meeting in which Stevas was allegedly rude to the Wheel's architects, Sherban Cantacuzino, the Commission's secretary, wrote to the architects saying: "I am sure that he enjoys putting people down, all of us have suffered from his bullying".
Despite all predictions, in 1995 Stevas was reappointed for a third term as chairman.
His tenure as Master of Emmanuel College at Cambridge University (1991 to 1996) was equally controversial. He built a new conference centre (the Queen's Building) at the cost of some £8 million, the costs of which were pushed upwards by Lord St John's insistence on re-opening the quarry in Ketton, Rutland, to obtain limestone from the same source from which the college's Wren chapel was built. The dons apparently first had doubts about the wisdom of appointing Stevas when several of his friends were caught naked one night in the Fellows Garden swimming pool.
He had a reputation as a social liberal but his Roman Catholic background meant he voted against reforms on abortion and divorce. However, in 1956 he had written a pamphlet called "Obscenity and the Law". This became a key work of reference during subsequent reforms and also "reflected an intellectual shift toward the law's retreat from the pulpit".
Stevas never married or had children. Although never admitted, talked about or referred to in the media, he was in a same-sex relationship with Adrian Stanford for more than 50 years.
Stevas died in March 2012 at the age of 82. One of his last acts was to enter into a civil partnership with Stanford, thereby saving 40% Inheritance Tax on his £3.3 million estate.
Real Ecstasy
Hot & Wet
Live Sex Latinas
Babestation
Search
Member List
Help
