Dick Leonard

Dick Leonard died on June 24th at the age of 90 in his home in Albert Street surrounded by his adoring family. He had a long and full life and he reinvented his career several times, leaving his imprint in a number of different professions, disciplines and cities. Dick bore witness to and was a player in many of the big stories that dominate British public life today - the battle over Europe, austerity, the crisis of the left in an affluent society, the effects of polling and the media on our politics, great power struggles and geopolitical tension. During his long life he was an eye witness to many of these big stories - whether as a politically precocious child, a think-tanker, a Labour activist, a member of Parliament, a journalist and a historian.

Born a year after the great depression in 1930, he grew up with tales from his father about the Great War. His father Cyril Leonard who was born in 1895 left school at the age of 14 and enlisted to fight in the Royal Artillery Corps on 7 August 1914, three days after the outbreak of fighting. Dick’s mother Katie Whyte 1890, left school at 17 and became a short hand typist at a furniture store in Great Russell Street, called Restall, Brown, and Clenell where she met Cyril when he joined as an office boy. They married in 1926 and soon had their first child John Leonard, who went on to have a distinguished career as a physician. Dick was born four years later. With the onset of World War 2 in late 1939 Dick was evacuated to a boarding school in Wardington, near Banbury. As a child Dick began supporting the Labour Party and was proud to collect voting returns for the party on his bicycle in the 1945 General Election. He encountered many of the great people who built the labour movement and the modern welfare state - Attlee, Bevan, Gaitskell, Morrison - and had personal relationships with many of figures of the next generation such as Roy Jenkins, Dennis Healey and above all Tony Crosland.

On his return to London he went to Ealing Grammar School where he became an obsessive chess player (his name first appeared in print as author of articles on chess). From there he secured a place to study politics at the London School of Economics under Harold Laski but it was conditional on completing national service. Seared by the experience of World War 2, he became a ‘conscientious objector’ and risked imprisonment to avoid military service. In the end the court mandated that he take on ‘clerical duties of national importance’ - which he did at the electricity board - and he had to forgo his university place. Instead he studied to be a teacher at the Institute of Education at London University and worked as a school teacher from 1953 to 1955. In order to escape the class room he managed to secure a job with the National Union of Teachers editing its newsletter, The Teacher. From there he went to the Fabian Society as assistant general secretary in 1955 where he was interviewed by a panel that I think included GDH and Margaret Cole, Harold Laski and Harold Wilson.

In the 1950s he saw the big debates about the future of socialism in an affluent society at first hand as well as the responses to Hungary and Suez. He hitch-hiked across Europe, travelling to Yugoslavia and Poland, taking part in various socialist camps. He was the youngest candidate in the 1955 General Election, standing in the hopeless seat of Harrow West with a manifesto that committed him to unilateral nuclear disarmament. Whilst at the Fabians he set up the Young Fabians and was also active in furthering the aims of the Fabian Colonial Bureau (he told me a story about driving Kenneth Kaunda back to London from Oxford and the two of them having to push his decrepit Morris Minor car when it broke down).

It was at a summer school in Oxford in the summer of 1960, at the end of his tenure at the Fabian Society, that he met a 16-year-old Irene Heidelberger on the croquet lawn at Beatrice Webb House. She had been brought along by her socialist mother in the hope of improving her English. This improbable encounter was the defining relationship of his life and led to an inspiring marriage in 1963. Throughout their 60 years together, Dick and Irene had an almost symbiotic partnership, whilst both lived very diverse and autonomous lives. Dick invested himself in Irene’s academic career, Irene invested herself in every one of Dick's re-incarnations. Dick was an extraordinary father both to Mark and Miriam at every stage. Mark followed Dick's political path, Miriam chose Irene's path into academia.

Back in in 1960, Dick left the Fabian society to travel around America in JFK's presidential jet as part of the press corps for the first televised election. He covered the elections for the various newspapers (including Reynolds News), gave lectures at American universities went to jazz clubs in Greenwich village and watched Jonah Jones, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong perform live. He saw the first UN general Assembly including Khrushchev's shoe-bashing and Fidel Castro's 5 hour oration.

When he returned he helped to make sense of the importance of opinion polls - and masterminded televised election coverage for the BBC in the 1964 and 1966 elections - complete with an early black and white swingometer. He wrote one of the first long articles on opinion polling in the 1950s which was considered an important contribution to the development of a nascent branch of political science, ‘psephology’ the study of voter behaviour.

A central theme in Dick’s life was Britain’s troubled relationship with Europe. His internationalism was no doubt driven by personal experience. The dislocation of world war in his father’s and his own childhood, the experience of marrying a German Jew and becoming an intrinsic member of her cosmopolitan family, and eventually moving to Brussels to have a ring-side seat at the creation of the single market and the euro. But the most powerful expressions of this were political. As a new MP whose parliamentary seat was redrawn in a boundary review, he made the life-changing decision to vote against the Labour Party Whip in the 1971 votes on joining the European Community, joining forces with 68 other Labour rebels who were led by Roy Jenkins.

Dick’s political life was defined by historic debates about the realignment of the left. As a young candidate in 1955 he was very much on the Bevanite wing of the party, but while at the Fabian Society he got to know Tony Crosland who had a profound impact on his outlook and political philosophy. Dick became convinced by his ‘revisionist; creed and was persuaded that the pursuit of equality was more important than the means used to further it. As an MP he became PPS to Crosland but also maintained close links with the pro-European social democrats who had gathered around Roy Jenkins. Dick’s parliamentary accomplishments included becoming an early campaigner on housing issues which he could see were central to the idea of equalising people’s life chances. He also pursued a campaign against titles and served as a Vice-Chair of the “Labour Friends of Israel”, a role which allowed him to travel to Israel with his young wife who was able to meet her grandmother for the first time as well as Golda Meier. When the boundaries of his Romford seat were redrawn he decided to seek selection elsewhere but was not able to get selected, no doubt because he had voted with the Conservatives on British Membership of the European Community. He lost his seat in 1974 but he never gave up his political convictions and remained close to the big stories of the age. I remember as a child when Roy Jenkins came to dinner in our house in Brussels and the discussions about a realignment of the Left. In his despair over the fact that Labour had lost its way, Dick ended up joining the SDP under the leadership of Roy Jenkins although he found the idea of leaving the Labour Party so painful that he could not bring himself to join the SDP when it was first launched. He was very happy to rejoin the party he loved some time after the 1992 election.

After losing his seat Dick reinvented himself as a journalist. From 1974 to 1985 he was Assistant Editor of The Economist. The Economist unfortunately made the fateful decision to close its Brussels bureau at that time – just as the Single European Act was negotiated and Dick decided to leave the Economist rather than returning to the UK. The main reason for this was that his beloved wife Irene had secured a professorship at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Leonard then reinvented himself as a free-lance journalist, writing a syndicated column for dozens of respected international newspapers on international affairs and serving as the Brussels and European Union correspondent for The Observer (London) from 1989 to 1997. He remained in Brussels until 2009, and wrote on Belgian politics in The Bulletin. In his time in Brussels he chronicled the creation of the modern EU, witnessing debates about the snake, the single market, the Maastricht Treaty, the enlargement of the EU and the birth of the euro. He wrote this up in the definitive guide to the EU which remains in print and is now entering its 12th edition.

In 2009, following the birth of his first grandson Jakob and Irene’s retirement from the ULB, Dick returned to Albert Street, NW1, where he reinvented himself once again as a historian. In this capacity he has written or co-authored a number of books on contemporary and historical British politics, particularly focusing on Britain's prime ministers. The final volume of his 1,000 page study of British Prime Ministers was completed just a few weeks before his death and will be published in September 2021. Back in London, right until his death, he involved himself in Labour politics again and was particularly invested in the election of Keir Starmer, who not only became a trusted friend - Keir visited him a few days before his death - but reinforced his almost childlike faith that with Keir Starmer at the helm, a better world was still possible. Dick was also a constant support to his children Miriam and Mark and was a devoted grandfather to their children Jakob, Noa and Isaac.

Dick had some defining qualities which recurred in all of his incarnations. His idealism led him to pursue a life of public service, and often to take the difficult path rather than easier options: risking imprisonment for his conscientious objection, sacrificing his political career to vote for European engagement, briefly leaving the Labour Party he loved because it had lost its way. His resilience was extraordinary and allowed him to reinvent himself after every set back – always focusing on the future rather than mourning the past and excelling in multiple fields. One of the enabling factors was his legendary optimism and his ability to see light at the end of the darkest tunnels. Never resigned to accept his fate, Dick resolved to be the captain of his soul and find ways of making things better in an incremental way. His ideals were coupled with an extraordinary tolerance and kindness to others which won him friends and admirers from lots of different persuasions and walks of life. This combination of traits led to an extraordinary loyalty to other people, which in turn attracted it from others. As Bill Rodgers said in a tribute to him on his 70th Birthday “Dick has always been true to himself which is why his friends have found it so easy to be true to him”.

Mark Leonard, 26 June 2021