Sir John Stanley, Thatcher’s PPS and Housing Minister who devised and piloted Right to Buy

Sir John Stanley, who has died aged 83, served in the Commons for 41 years without fulfilling his early promise as a personable and effective PPS to Margaret Thatcher.

Made Housing Minister when she came to power, he spent nine jittery years in three departments, only recovering his confidence and authority years later as a senior backbencher.

In opposition Mrs Thatcher identified Stanley as a future “star of the Nineties”. But he suffered a severe loss of nerve, from the moment on the eve of the 1979 election campaign when he was the first colleague to reach her mentor Airey Neave as he lay dying from an INLA bomb; reduced to tears, he then had to break the news to her in her constituency.

A jittery first Question Time as a minister, comments from Stanley which provoked a strike by Tory peers and an embarrassing mix-up over parliamentary answers all fuelled a loss of confidence unfairly interpreted as a tetchy aloofness.

Stanley eventually found his niche on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with his powerful yet measured questioning of Dr David Kelly and his superiors prior to the Government weapons expert’s suicide.

He made a similar impact in later hearings over whether Kelly was the source for the notorious BBC story that Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s communications director, had “sexed up” the Government’s dossier about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction.

Tall and fresh-faced, with what one colleague termed “a veneer of apparent efficiency”, Stanley deployed his open charm to good effect as he helped Mrs Thatcher prepare for power. Yet after his baptism of fire at the Department of the Environment under Michael Heseltine (on whom she had appointed Stanley to keep tabs), his difficulties followed him to the MoD.

The whistle-blowing civil servant Clive Ponting rated him “a difficult minister to deal with”, a view widely shared. When Stanley left the MoD for Northern Ireland, his private office cleared a line to Stormont so his new staff could hear the champagne corks popping.

John Paul Stanley was born on January 19 1942, the son of Harry and Maud Stanley; his mother was for a time personal secretary to Sir Winston Churchill. Educated at Repton and Lincoln College, Oxford, he joined the Conservative Research Department in 1967.

After a year he moved to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, then in 1969 to Rio Tinto-Zinc as a financial analyst. Later planning manager, he remained there until becoming a minister.

He first fought Newton in Lancashire in 1970. The next year he was shortlisted from 500 hopefuls for Arundel and Shoreham, but after a final stage in which their wives also were grilled, he and Douglas Hurd were passed over for Richard Luce.

Stanley was selected for Tonbridge and Malling in time for the snap election of February 1974. He took it with a 10,000 majority over a Liberal, with the young Jack Straw 18 votes further behind. That October Stanley was re-elected by a smaller margin over another Labour candidate, Straw having become Barbara Castle’s special adviser; he held the seat comfortably thereafter.

At Westminster he concentrated on economic issues in the fervid atmosphere following Labour’s surprise return to power and Tony Benn’s installation as Industry Secretary. In the chamber, and in the Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, he tackled Benn on the cost to industry of his Left-wing policies and his support for the Meriden motorcycle co-operative.

Heseltine, shadowing Benn, was quick to spot Stanley’s potential. He made him his link with the paper industry, and took him along when visiting the Kirkby engineering co-operative, another of Benn’s pet projects. Mrs Thatcher was watching too, and when Fergus Montgomery quit as her joint PPS in January 1976, she sent for Stanley.

As well as liaising with Tory backbenchers, Stanley travelled with her as she familiarised herself with world affairs, notably on her first visit to China in 1977. On these trips Stanley proved a helpful contact for the media.

During the 1979 campaign, Stanley’s wife Susan took over his meetings after he slipped a disc accompanying Mrs Thatcher round the West Country. She later organised a highly effective Christian group for MPs, their wives and staff.

The election won, Mrs Thatcher made Stanley Minister of State for Housing, irritating established front-benchers like Norman Lamont who received more junior posts. His relationship with his officials at the DoE got off on the wrong foot when one greeted him with: “Mr Stanley, I presume,” and he failed to get the joke.

It was Stanley’s misfortune to go into his first Question Time with a flimsy brief and be “brutally waylaid”, as Edward Pearce put it in The Daily Telegraph, by Gerald Kaufman. Asked why private tenants had no right to buy their homes when council tenants could, Stanley argued that the two situations were different; when he added that he “cared about housing”, Kaufman went for the jugular.

Stanley never received full credit for reviving the private letting market by introducing shorthold tenancies, or for piloting the flagship Right to Buy policy – which he had devised at Central Office – through the House and facing down Labour councils who resisted it; in his four years as housing minister 500,000 council tenants bought their homes.

Yet even on an issue as popular as this, he triggered a 30-minute strike by peers (and earned a rocket from Lord Soames, their leader) by rejecting their amendments while they were still considering the Bill.

He was at the centre of a more damaging storm when forced to admit that two written answers to Straw which he had approved were not those the MP subsequently received. The resulting internal inquiry reinforced the impression that Stanley was not on top of his officials, though Heseltine shouldered the blame.

In 1983 Mrs Thatcher moved him sideways to the MoD as Armed Forces Minister, again under Heseltine; a place on the Privy Council followed. Here again events undermined him; he was stuck in a lift just before Defence Questions and had to be briefed through a chink in the door while engineers worked to free him.

He also became a target of Tam Dalyell’s campaign to prove Mrs Thatcher had lied over the circumstances in which the General Belgrano was torpedoed during the Falklands conflict. After Ponting’s acquittal on charges of breaking the Official Secrets Act by leaking information about the sinking, Dalyell called on Stanley to resign for misleading the Commons by signing a memorandum which did not state that the rules of engagement had been changed.

Stanley was lucky to survive, though again the fault was not his. He did, however, give as good as he got in the decisive debate, and Mrs Thatcher invited him round for drink.

He is best remembered at the MoD, however, for ordering an RAF sniffer dog to Norway to check the aircraft in which he was due to return. Mission completed, the animal was condemned to six months’ quarantine.

He survived Heseltine’s resignation over Westland, and after the 1987 election moved to the Northern Ireland Office under Tom King. Given responsibility for security, Stanley spent all possible time in Stormont Castle while other ministers criss-crossed the province.

When he did venture out, he demanded the bulldozing of a house overlooking traffic lights where he was delayed. Told it had to stay because it belonged to a prominent Loyalist, Stanley insisted an RUC officer be posted there to wave him through; the Chief Constable, Jack Hermon, volubly countermanded the order.

Stanley was also haunted by the backlash from his decision when at the MoD to allow Pte Ian Thain, who had served three years of a life sentence for shooting an unarmed civilian in Ulster, to return to duty, though not in the province. It came as little surprise when he was sacked in July 1988; an ever-loyal Mrs Thatcher had him knighted that autumn. He would, however, return to the field of defence in 2001 as a member of the Nato assembly.

On the back benches he kept a low profile until in 1992 he joined the Foreign Affairs Committee. His probing of the conduct of Tory ministers in the Pergau Dam affair, when Malaysia was given £234 ​million for an uneconomic dam to sweeten an order for arms, earned him new respect.

Stanley was a sceptic on rail privatisation, and a vigorous champion of constituents affected by plans for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, pressing ministers hard for fair compensation.

He retired from the Commons at the 2015 election.

John Stanley married Susan Giles in 1968; they divorced in 2005. In 2006 he married Elizabeth Brooks, née Tait, who survives him, along with a son and a daughter of his first marriage; another son predeceased him.

Sir John Stanley, born January 19 1942, died November 28 2025​

[Source: Daily Telegraph]