If ever there could be a personification of the establishment phrase about the Great and the Good, the lawyer and academic Patrick Neill, Lord Neill of Bladen, was it. Tall and thin, slightly shambling in gait, courtly in manner and with a voice that came quietly strangulated from the back of his throat, he was the sort of unimpeachable and authoritative figure whom governments consult for comfort. In Neill’s case, he also occasionally bit them, as Tony Blair discovered when, after Neill was appointed chairman of the committee on standards in public life in 1997, he promptly demanded that the Labour party should repay the Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone’s million-pound donation, which appeared to have been offered in hopes of a commercial favour.
Neill, who has died aged 89, was in turn a commercial barrister and arbitrator, judge and chairman of the Bar Council, warden of All Souls College, Oxford and the university’s vice-chancellor, as well as chairman of the Press Council, among other public posts. How effectively he managed the plethora of offices he held, particularly in the City of London, may be open to debate. As first chairman of the Council for the Securities Industry (1978-85), he favoured self regulation for City institutions, at the Press Council (1978-83), he appealed unsuccessfully for tabloids to exercise intelligence and humanity and, although he sought increased transparency in political party funding, he did not achieve the same for MPs’ expenses.
Neill was born in London, the son of the businessman Sir Thomas Neill and his wife, Annie (nee Bishop). Educated at Highgate school, he was commissioned as a subaltern in the Rifle Brigade in the last year of the second world war, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study law. At university he won the glittering prizes of the Gibbs and Eldon scholarships and, after achieving a first, won a prize fellowship at All Souls, the wealthy repository of the university’s more intellectual eccentrics. Junior members of the college, elected by competitive examination from the highest achieving finals graduates, are funded and given rooms and dining rights, but are not necessarily expected to embark on postgraduate study.
Accordingly, Neill also launched his career as a barrister at Gray’s Inn, specialising in patent and commercial law, though he did later also appear for the defence in the successful prosecution of Hubert Selby’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn for obscenity in 1967.
Neill might have become a High Court judge, as his older brother Brian did, but, although he served as a recorder of the Crown Court for three years and was later an appeal court judge in the Channel Islands, he instead returned to All Souls in 1972, first as sub-warden, before being elected warden in 1977. While the college’s more hidebound customs did not greatly alter, there was one notable breach during his tenure, when women were elected to fellowships for the first time – though once they arrived, the brave pioneering candidates were subjected to both unchecked snobbery and gruesome misogyny from some of the fellows.
Neill was head of the college for 18 years and, for four of them, from 1985 until 1989, was also the university’s vice-chancellor. It was during this time that Oxford’s pioneering fund-raising campaign was launched with Neill at its head, though not necessarily at its cutting edge. The university needed to raise funds to stave off shortfalls in government funding, but had little idea how to do it, or even how much it wished or needed to collect. It had no tradition of tapping up its graduates or appealing for donations – the colleges were reluctant even to allow the university access to alumni addresses – and the diffident Neill was much too reticent to gladhand wealthy would-be benefactors easily.
Even so, the power of the Oxford name meant that the initial target of £10m increased first to £220m and ultimately reached £350m. Even Rupert Murdoch stumped up £3m for a chair in language and communication. By that point Neill was also an independent director of Times Newspapers. He was less successful in persuading the university’s dons to vote Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree in 1985, or to elect the Conservative historian Lord Blake as Oxford’s chancellor in 1987, and when he stood as a candidate for the same post in 2003 he too lost – to Chris Patten.
Meanwhile, Neill was busy with a series of external appointments: it was said that if he had divested himself of some of them, he could have halved the unemployment rate. Lord Goodman had rated him the brightest young man at the Bar and he became in due course a member of the Bar Council, then in 1974 its chairman and chairman of the Senate of the Inns of Court.
He chaired committees of inquiry into the Lloyd’s insurance market as City scandals emerged. The Council for the Securities Industry under his chairmanship proved slow in reining in rogue traders and dawn raiders launching pre-emptive strikes on rival companies. Rules were tightened, but largely by self regulation, which tended to favour insiders, not investors. As he said himself, when appointed to head the Press Council, Neill was not a natural crusader: “I do not consider that there are Augean stables to be cleaned out … I simply have preconceptions about fairness and the standards that should be maintained.” The tabloids did not share his fastidiousness.
It was as a lawyer that Neill was called in by Blair to chair the committee on standards in public life in 1997 – the so-called “parliamentary sleazebuster” – though his first decision, on Ecclestone’s donation, which appeared to have successfully enlisted the government’s opposition to a ban on tobacco advertising in Formula One motorsport, was not perhaps what Blair had anticipated. The committee nevertheless established guidelines to regulate party funding and election expenditure. “What the British public wants is openness of information about sources of funding of political parties,” Neill declared. “They want to know who is giving and how much and in particular … (do) not want money coming from abroad. Political parties should be funded here, internally, by donations but not by the state.”
Eyebrows were raised, however, when Neill was found to have accepted the brief to represent Shirley Porter, the disgraced former leader of Westminster Council over her notorious “homes for votes” policy. He insisted he had merely been engaged through the barristers’ cab rank principle and had not noticed a potential conflict of interest. Among other committee recommendations was one that taxpayers’ money should not be spent on promoting the government case in referendums – a sad coincidence that he should die just as it became an issue in the current campaign, particularly as Neill had always been deeply suspicious of the Common Market, which he held to be an unconstitutional infringement on national sovereignty and particularly the European Court: “a supreme court with a mission is tyranny”.
Neill was knighted in 1983 and created a life peer in 1997.
His wife, Caroline (nee Debenham), whom he married in 1954, died in 2010, and one of their sons also predeceased him. He is survived by three sons and two daughters.
• Francis Patrick Neill, Lord Neill of Bladen, born 8 August 1926; died 28 May 2016
