Sir Jeremy Hanley, formidable Conservative MP whose gaffes cut short his tenure as party chairman

Sir Jeremy Hanley, who has died aged 80, was a breezy, teddy bear-like, liberal Tory with a showbusiness background who struggled as John Major’s Conservative Party chairman at the nadir of his government’s fortunes.

While Major was lampooned as “the boy who ran away from the circus to join a bank”, Hanley became a renowned trainer of accountants – even getting Mark Thatcher through an exam – after his mother refused to let him go on the stage.

Mother knew best; she was Dinah Sheridan, star of the 1953 classic Genevieve. His father was Jimmy Hanley, of The Blue Lamp fame, and his sister Jenny a popular television presenter.

Jeremy made a screen appearance in Holiday Camp (1947) as a baby held aloft by Jack Warner and Kathleen Harrison, with food all over his face. At six, he presented a bouquet to Princess Margaret at the première of Where No Vultures Fly.

Elected for Richmond in 1983, he declared himself “the only MP who appears naked on television every Tuesday night”; his photo at six months was visible in the titles of the sitcom Don’t Wait Up, starring his mother. Nigel Havers played her son, so Hanley took to addressing the actor’s Attorney-General father Sir Michael Havers as “Dad”.

A brilliant mimic, Hanley could fool with his impressions of Ian Paisley; sending him as a minister to Northern Ireland, Major told him: “Jeremy, you are ideal. You speak the language.” At Westminster, he was the acting profession’s unofficial representative.

Hanley was a formidable constituency MP, holding a seat that had seemed certain to fall to the Liberals and twice increasing his majority. Showmanship played a part: in 1993 he persuaded the transport minister Lord Caithness to overnight in his conservatory to experience noise from night flights using Heathrow.

At 6ft 4in and nearly 18 stone, Hanley had charm, presence and few enemies – save for Eurosceptics. With his government on the slide despite an improving economy, Major gambled in 1994 by appointing him party chairman, hoping his sincerity and bonhomie would change Tory fortunes. Norman Tebbit, a predecessor, shrewdly warned that Hanley was “not a big enough hitter”.

Hanley got on famously with the Conservative grassroots, and cut the party’s overdraft by £4.5 million in a year. But in presentational terms – where it counted most – the appointment did not work.

Three weeks in, Tony Blair was elected Labour leader and Hanley set out unconvincingly to warn of a lurch to the Left. He upset the Right by hinting that Britain might re-enter the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which Norman Lamont had humiliatingly been forced to quit. Then, on Breakfast with Frost, he excused a ringside riot during a Nigel Benn-Juan Carlos Giménez world title fight as “just exuberance”.

From then on the word “gaffe-prone” preceded him. He was kept off current affairs programmes during the party’s 1994 conference, where he ordered photographers to operate from the back of the hall to give the faithful a clear view; the snappers retaliated with a boycott. Hanley in his speech urged Conservatives to be as disciplined as Labour, launched a drive to recruit 100,000 members and told rebel MPs to stop causing trouble.

Hanley disclosed that he had warned the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, of public disquiet over increasing VAT on fuel to 17.5 per cent – a proposal defeated in the House – and described Major as “unassailable”, the word Margaret Thatcher had used of Nigel Lawson just before his departure. A spectacular by-election defeat at Dudley was blamed on Hanley having said that, despite a 5,789 Conservative majority, talk of victory was “idle speculation”.

He sprang to the defence of Manchester United’s Eric Cantona after he attacked a spectator at Crystal Palace, and opposed calls for an elected successor to the Greater London Council, having himself voted for one. When he called for tax cuts straddling the next election, Clarke disowned him.

Hanley gave his friend Jonathan Aitken a platform at Central Office to launch his libel action against The Guardian, and his parallel campaign against “bent and twisted journalism”; Aitken would later be imprisoned for perjury. He denounced Labour’s special conference to scrap Clause IV - its commitment to nationalisation - as a stunt, and appealed to broadcasters not to show it live, citing imminent local elections.

At the start of that campaign, he declared that Labour councils “tend to be corrupt” because they employed so many councillors’ relatives; the papers discovered Hanley had employed his wife and two sons at the Commons. The Tories were routed, losing 2,056 seats.

With the former party treasurer Lord McAlpine calling Hanley a “pantaloon”, speculation grew that he faced the sack. After defeating John Redwood’s leadership challenge that July, Major demoted him from the Cabinet to Minister of State at the Foreign Office.

Jeremy James Hanley was born on November 17 1945. He joined Peat Marwick Mitchell at 18, straight from Rugby. Qualifying as an accountant in 1969, he became a lecturer in law, taxation and accountancy with Anderson Thomas Frankel.

After a year he was managing director of ATF Jersey and Ireland, lecturing in the Channel Islands, and in 1973 deputy chairman of the Financial Training Company, staying until 1990. A subsidiary produced advertising voiceovers, with which Hanley helped.

He joined the Bow Group in 1974, chairing its home affairs committee, and the European Movement, in which he remained throughout his years at Westminster.

He fought Lambeth Central in an April 1978 by-election notable for its 11 candidates, then a post-war record; Hanley said 38 years of Labour control out of 41 had left Brixton a “rotten borough”. He more than halved Labour’s majority, but it rose when he stood again the next year.

In 1981 he was selected for Richmond in place of the retiring Sir Anthony Royle. The  outlook could not have been darker: Richmond was the Liberal-SDP Alliance’s third most winnable seat, a Liberal represented it on the GLC, and Shirley Williams had the day before inflicted a shattering by-election defeat on the Tories at Crosby.

Hanley, chairman of the Conservative Candidates’ Committee, worked Richmond hard, and in 1983 scrambled home by 74 votes against the broadcaster Alan Watson. He continued campaigning, on issues such as the hardship caused by the closure of Hammersmith Bridge for repairs and the threat of an orbital road through Barnes. It was three years before he took a holiday; Hanley arrived at the airport in plaster after a tennis injury, and his wife in an ambulance from an operation for appendicitis.

He served on the Home Affairs Select Committee, and became vice-chairman of the Conservative backbench Trade and Industry Committee. He was applauded at the 1922 Committee when he criticised Mrs Thatcher for comparing David Steel and Dr David Owen with the two ends of a pantomime horse.

In 1987 Hanley increased his majority over Watson, now leader of Richmond council, to 1,766. He became PPS to the Arts Minister, Richard Luce, and moderated his criticism of Mrs Thatcher. When he praised her promptness and compassion in visiting the scenes of the Lockerbie and Kegworth air disasters, Labour’s Tony Banks shouted: “You’ll have to do better than that, Jerry.”

During exchanges on the cost of the Royal Opera House, Frank Haynes, Labour MP for Ashfield, exclaimed: “If the minister’s PPS had half the beauty of his beloved mother, I would be a great deal happier to see him sitting there.” Hanley arranged for Luce to summon Haynes to his office – and in came Dinah Sheridan. Haynes came away “practically in tears”.

After negotiating with the Treasury to reduce tax demands on actors, Hanley became PPS to the Environment Secretary Chris Patten, and then in December 1990 joined Major’s first government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Northern Ireland.

Initially he was responsible for health, social security and agriculture, but after the 1992 election – when he further increased his majority – Major made him right-hand man to Patrick Mayhew as talks on a political settlement got under way. He missed the first round that September, being in Las Vegas for his mother’s fourth wedding.

Soon after, her second husband, the former Rank Organisation chairman Sir John Davis – whom she had accused of extreme sexual cruelty during an acrimonious divorce three decades before – died. Spotting Davis’s obituary, he rang his mother and serenaded her with a chorus of Happy Days Are Here Again.

In May 1993 Major promoted him to Minister of State for the Armed Forces. He spent much of his time announcing cuts stemming from Options for Change, the restructuring following the end of the Cold War. He announced the end of the Wrens and the WRAF as separate entities, supported random drug tests in the Royal Navy, and disclosed that 1,790 servicewomen dismissed on becoming pregnant had been paid £7.5 million in compensation. He pacified fishermen by announcing that they would in future be notified when the Navy conducted live-firing exercises in home waters.

Hanley had to row back after telling the Commons that all troops who had served in the Gulf War had been warned about depleted uranium shells, when they had not. He had to apologise again when it emerged that refurbishing an official residence for Air Chief Marshal Sir Sandy Wilson had cost £127,000 more than MPs had been told.

In June 1994 he visited the scene of the Chinook helicopter crash on the Mull of Kintyre which killed the cream of Northern Ireland’s intelligence community. He attributed the disaster to pilot error, which remained the official explanation for years until the MoD admitted to a fault in the navigation system.

The next month Hanley became party chairman, with a seat in Cabinet as Minister Without Portfolio. The novelist and former advertising executive Michael Dobbs became his deputy; this upset right-wingers who wanted an ideologue like Michael Forsyth.

Hanley’s later 21-month tenure at the FCO was uncontroversial. One of his responsibilities was helping Patten, now governor of Hong Kong, prepare for the colony’s handover to China.

He finally lost his seat - renamed Richmond Park - to a Liberal Democrat in 1997. He became chairman of International Trade and Investment Missions, the British-Iranian Chamber of Commerce and several companies.  

Hanley was a member of Mensa, and chairman of the chess and draughts internet company Braingames Network. He was a Freeman of the City of London and in 2005-06 Master of the Chartered Accountants’ Company.

He became a privy counsellor in 1994 and was appointed KCMG in 1997.

Jeremy Hanley married Helene Mason in 1968; the marriage was dissolved in 1973, when he married, secondly, Verna Stott, formerly Viscountess Villiers. She survives him with a son from each marriage and a stepdaughter.

Sir Jeremy Hanley, born November 17 1945, died May 22 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]