John Roper, Lord Roper, who has died aged 80, was the consummate politician who, working largely in the background, made things happen. Although he was deeply involved in discussions and soundings that led to the formation in 1981 of the Social Democratic party, he did not have the public profile of a cabinet minister and so was never counted as one of the “Gang of Four” – Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Bill Rodgers – who announced their break with Labour outside Owen’s house in Limehouse, in east London.
He was also at the centre of the controversy at Oxford University when, only one year into his degree and an active participant in the Labour Group and the Labour Club, he and other students challenged through a plebiscite the then current defence policy based around nuclear weapons. It was 1957, just before JB Priestley wrote his famous article for the New Statesman magazine advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament. CND was established shortly thereafter.
John was a builder of coalitions, bringing together people and ideas. But he always seemed one step ahead. While his contemporaries pondered one move, he had already worked out the next. Small wonder, perhaps, that he was one of “Roy’s Boys”, who worked closely with Jenkins and Rodgers in the creation of the breakaway party.
He was born in Norwich, the eldest of six children of the Rev Eric Hodgess Roper, a Congregational minister, and his wife, Frances (nee Brockway), a sister of the Labour MP Fenner (later Lord) Brockway. The family moved frequently, and John attended several schools, including William Hulme’s grammar school in Manchester and Reading school.
He did national service as an RNVR officer. In August 1956 he was serving in the Mediterranean where the invasion of Suez was being planned, but by October the same year he was protesting against it as an undergraduate. He went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read philosophy, politics and economics, and thence to the University of Chicago, after which he became an economics lecturer at Manchester University.
His concern for social justice and international collaboration was already evident in his teens, but it was not until he relinquished his presidency of the UN Student Association that he became a member of the Labour party. In 1959, he married Hope Edwards, whom he had met at Oxford. She was secretary of the students’ campaign against nuclear defence policy. She was from a political family: her father was John Edwards, a former trade union secretary, junior minister of health to Nye Bevan and economic secretary to the Treasury, who was a prominent pro-European.
John was selected as Labour-Co-op candidate to fight the Derbyshire seat of High Peak in the 1964 election, losing by a narrow margin. The election brought in the Labour government of Harold Wilson with a majority of only five. John stood again, this time successfully, in June 1970 for Farnworth, Lancashire, a seat he held until 1983, by which time he had switched from Labour to SDP. He said that after 13 years as voting fodder for Labour he wanted to “do something useful”.
In 1972, he began working with others as an unofficial whip, to assist the passage of the European Communities Act being pushed through by Edward Heath’s government. He had a passionate belief in the European project and a keen interest in defence and economics. Under James Callaghan he was the frontbench opposition spokesman on defence. He was a member of the council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies from 1975 to 1990. He wrote books on teaching economics at university level and on defence policy.
Following his defection to the SDP, a move he fully expected to cost him his seat in the Commons, he became that party’s chief whip for the following two years. His Farnworth seat was abolished in 1983 and he stood unsuccessfully for the new Greater Manchester constituency of Worsley, finishing third in a three-way marginal.
However, John’s wide knowledge of defence issues and ability to think strategically led him to the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), which he joined in 1984, as an editor. From there he moved as founding director in 1990 to the Western European Union Strategic Studies Institute in Paris. When required to retire at the age of 60 from the WEU, he returned to Chatham House. In 2000 he was made a life peer.
It was his work at Chatham House that led, in 2003, to a brief and unwelcome appearance in the media. When the East German Stasi files were finally opened, the historian Anthony Glees discovered that John had unwittingly employed an undercover Stasi agent as a research fellow. Glees claimed John was “an agent of influence”, a charge rejected by fellow cold-war historians, by John himself and, by implication, the Foreign Office, who knew about the researcher’s employment. In 2005 John was made a Privy Counsellor. As one observer put it, they do not appoint collaborators with spies to the Privy Council.
As a working Liberal Democrat peer, John served as chief whip from 2001 to 2005, and then chaired the important European Union committee. He occasionally sat on the Woolsack as deputy chair of the House, and retired in 2015 due to growing incapacity brought on by motor neurone disease.
A skilled and resourceful networker, John had the remarkable ability to “fit in” with the company in which he found himself, from factory workers to peers of the realm. During his time in the navy, he had been wine steward on HMS Undaunted, and he retained a keen interest in vintages, which enhanced his reputation as a bon vivant.
Hope died in 2003. John is survived by his daughter, Kate, and three grandchildren.
• John Francis Hodgess Roper, Lord Roper, politician, born 10 September 1935; died 29 January 2016
