Richard Wainwright

Plain-speaking Liberal MP for Colne Valley

Richard Scurrah Wainwright, politician and accountant: born Leeds 11 April 1918; MP (Liberal) for Colne Valley 1966-70, 1974-87; Chairman, Liberal Party Research Department 1968-70; Chairman, Liberal Party 1970-72; married 1948 Joyce Hollis (one son, two daughters, and one son deceased); died Leeds 16 January 2003.

The Liberal MP Richard Wainwright disguised innate shyness by adopting the manner of a bluff Yorkshireman. Hard-working, plain-speaking and immensely practical, he had an instinctive understanding of the Liberal rank and file and they in turn respected the way in which he articulated deeply held Liberal beliefs.

His immense popularity was only once shaken. That was just after he had contributed to the toppling in 1976 of the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, by calling on Thorpe to sue Norman Scott over allegations that they had had a homosexual relationship. "The truth has got to be brought out." His distaste for Thorpe's theatrical style of leadership was well known. Less well known was the fact that he had refused to run against Thorpe for the party leadership in 1967, believing himself too junior. In 1976 he backed John Pardoe, but the leadership went to David Steel.

Wainwright gave his support to the Lib-Lab pact which propped up James Callaghan's government in March 1977. Although personally unhappy at how little the party had secured on devolution, he voted for the renewal of the pact, almost certainly because of the genuine concessions on help for small businesses and the self-employed that he had secured, and the promise of a move to profit-sharing. The Government's failure to deliver proportional representation for the European elections, however, turned him into an angry opponent of the pact, although he simmered down sufficiently to agree that it could last until the summer of 1978.

His long-standing interest in financial affairs was reflected in his role as Liberal spokesman on economics and industrial relations from 1966 to 1970, trade and industry, 1974-79, on the economy, 1979-85 and on employment, 1985-87. He served on the Expenditure Committee from 1974 to 1979 and the Treasury Select Committee from 1979 to 1987. He consistently argued for a prices and incomes policy as the right answer to inflation and the "unavoidable price of avoiding mass unemployment". He was a critic of Nigel Lawson as Chancellor of the Exchequer in particular, with typical trenchancy remarking that "there's plenty of price stability in the graveyard".

Richard Scurrah Wainwright was born in Leeds shortly before the end of the First World War, the son of a chartered accountant, and was educated at Shrewsbury. He won an open scholarship for History at Clare College, Cambridge, taking his finals in 1939, the year in which he gained the Presidency of the University Liberal Club. Brought up as a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector in the Second World War and served with the Friends Ambulance Unit.

On his return to Britain, he followed his father into the Leeds accountancy firm of Beevers and Adgie, becoming a partner in 1950. Wainwright had been deeply affected by what he saw of the depressed areas in the 1930s, but it did not incline him to socialism. His lifelong association with the Liberal Party was strengthened by his involvement in the Methodist Church as a lay preacher and his experience on difficult housing estates in the city.

He missed involvement in the 1945 election only because he stayed in Europe after the war to help with reconstruction, but in 1950 he plunged into the fight, contesting Pudsey. He finished a poor third in a knife-edge contest between the Conservative and Labour candidates. The Liberals could not afford to contest the seat in 1951, but in 1955 Wainwright returned to the fray, again finishing third.

Pudsey was by now safely Tory and in 1959 he switched his attentions to the historic seat of Colne Valley. In this first attempt he captured a quarter of the vote, but again finished third.

Wainwright's inability to gain a parliamentary seat at this stage of his career freed him to play an important part in the revival of the Liberal Party under Jo Grimond. He served as vice-president of the party from 1959 to 1966 and was well known for his organisational abilities. He chaired the party's organisation department for two years, inaugurated and personally financed the highly successful local government department, and was one of the organising committee that took control of the day-to-day activities of the party after the 1959 election, bypassing the complex committee structure that then governed the party. This horrified the party's constitutionalists and the position of the new body had to be formalised, a process in which Wainwright's practical mind was exercised to the full. He served as party chairman in 1971-72.

When the sitting Labour member for Colne Valley died, Wainwright contested the by-election in March 1963, cutting the majority to 2,039 and relegating the Conservative to third place. In 1964 he failed to take the seat by only 187 votes. In the teeth of a strong national tide to Labour in the March 1966 election, he halved the Conservative vote and took the seat by 2,499 votes. It was a remarkable triumph that turned to ashes four years later when a considerable Conservative resurgence enabled Labour to recapture the seat. Nothing daunted, in February 1974, he turned a Labour majority of 856 into a Liberal majority of 719.

The historic seat of Colne Valley was drastically remodelled before the 1983 election, so much so that it was initially renamed Huddersfield West, but Wainwright managed a 3,146 majority in a three-cornered contest in which he took two-fifths of the total vote. He stood down before the 1987 election, but refused to go to the "crematorium", which is how he regarded the House of Lords.

A long-standing supporter of regional government, he co-founded the Campaign for the North and in retirement served on the Council of the Electoral Reform Society and on the National Executive of Charter 88. Perhaps his most valued contribution to public policy-making, however, came earlier as a trustee of the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust, 1959-84, where he was adept at turning imaginative ideas into workable projects.

John Barnes