Antony Fisher: champion of liberty, by Gerald Frost

The chicken farmer who changed the world

Antony Fisher was an unusual, even improbable man of sharp contradictions. Although he became one of my closest friends, it was only reading Gerald Frost's convincing biography that I glimpsed how eccentric he might appear. A tall, handsome old Etonian, who flew his own aeroplane at Cambridge before joining the RAF, he was a devout Christian Scientist. Though he neither drank, smoked nor swore, and performed daily religious devotions, he was an uninhibited host, equally at home with the rumbustious Douglas Bader and the austere Enoch Powell.

After the war he acquired a dairy farm in Sussex and ran a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. It was the destruction of his herd by foot-and-mouth disease that turned him to poultry and so to create Buxted Chickens as the largest producer of oven-ready birds, at a price that transformed chicken from a luxury treat to an everyday meal.

As a practical countryman, he could be supposed innocent of intellectual pretensions. Yet in 1955 he used part of his early profits to register the Institute of Economic Affairs as an educational charity. Two years later he appointed me as general director, to be joined by Arthur Seldon as the visionary editorial director. Thirty years later, just before his death at 73, our patron became Sir Antony Fisher on the recommendation of Margaret Thatcher.

Gerald Frost presents this unlikely story as the natural development of a patriotic Englishman who was seared to witness his younger brother shot down in the Battle of Britain – in defence, so he thought, of personal freedom. It was reading The Road to Serfdom, while contemplating the emergence abroad of Soviet Russia and at home of a Labour government, that sent Fisher in search of the author at the LSE. He asked Hayek what could be done to resist this collectivism which apparently threatened the end of economic, and therefore political, freedom.

Believing with Keynes that public policy was shaped in the long run by principled intellectuals, Hayek recommended Fisher to shun politics. Instead, he should seek out scholars who would endeavour to restore understanding of the classical liberal tradition of Adam Smith and David Hume. Frost describes the unfolding of Hayek's grand strategy as Seldon orchestrated a growing band of British, European and American economists, political scientists and historians to explore the application of free markets to goods and services long thought the preserve of state control.

Prominent among IEA authors were Hayek himself as well as Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, among half a dozen later Nobel laureates. Converts or proselytisers included politicians such as Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher, Jo Grimond – perhaps Tony Blair? When I once thanked my patron for trusting us to run the IEA without his intervention, he said with characteristic modesty that he didn't interfere because he didn't know how.

As Frost reports, that did not stop him devoting the last decade of his life to "exporting the revolution" by helping create dozens of IEA clones in Canada, the US and further afield. I may be biased, but it makes quite a story of achievement for an old Etonian chicken farmer.

Ralph Harris