Sir James Lester, the former Tory MP for the Nottinghamshire constituencies of Beeston and then Broxtowe, who has died aged 89, was so out of step with many of his colleagues in the Thatcherite 1980s that at times he seemed to be “almost one of us”, in the words of a Labour backbencher.
A close friend of his neighbouring Nottinghamshire MP Ken Clarke, he belonged to the One Nation Conservative breed that has all but been extinguished on the current Tory Commons benches: he was pro-European, pro-foreign aid, against cuts in benefits or privatising the Post Office and against extending the Official Secrets Act. He was not afraid, either, to be an early opponent of the Thatcher government’s attempt to introduce the poll tax.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, he only briefly held junior ministerial office at the Department of Employment under Jim Prior before being culled in Margaret Thatcher’s first reshuffle in January 1981 as being insufficiently ardent in pursuing trade union reform. A genial and convivial figure, always known at Westminster as Jim, he subsequently devoted his energies to his membership of the Commons foreign affairs select committee and the all party group on overseas development.
Jim was the son of Marjorie (nee Phillips) and Arthur Lester. His father, who ran a leather and shoe import business, was a Labour alderman on Nottinghamshire county council and in his spare time a speedway motorcyclist. In due course both father and son would serve on the county council, Jim as chair of the finance committee and Arthur as his vice-chairman.
When Jim was first elected as a Conservative MP his father said it was the proudest day of his life. Perhaps that family background was where Lester’s distinctly non-factional approach to politics came from. At home the politically obsessed family had taken both the Daily Mail and the Daily Worker.
Lester was educated at Nottingham high school – Clarke would follow to the same school eight years later and Ed Balls much later still – but instead of going on to university left at 16 to join the family business.
After he had completed national service with the Army, his political career began in local politics, on Bingham town council in 1964, followed by his election to the county council in 1967. He contested and very nearly won a parliamentary byelection for the then staunchly Labour coal-mining Bassetlaw constituency the following year, losing by only 740 votes, then fighting it again and losing more heavily at the general election in 1970.
He was then selected for the more suburban marginal seat of Beeston, winning it at the February 1974 election and clinging on by 120 votes at the following election that October. When the constituency was absorbed into the safer Broxtowe seat in 1983 he was elected there and held it until defeated in the Labour landslide of 1997.
Early in his Commons career Lester, together with his father, campaigned in favour of British membership of the Common Market in the 1975 referendum. At Westminster he was made a Tory whip, helping to organise a campaign to undermine the Labour government. After James Callaghan’s defeat by one vote in a confidence motion in March 1979, Lester and Clarke celebrated with a night out at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho.
The reward following the Tory victory that May was the junior ministerial job at employment. The idea was to introduce legislation curbing the powers of trade unions, but the prime minister was rapidly disillusioned by Prior and Lester’s approach as too conciliatory and gradualist: “wet” in her famous phrase. They were soon replaced by more robust figures, in Lester’s case Norman Tebbit.
With little chance of further promotion, Lester became a member of the Commons foreign affairs select committee, a position he would hold for the next 15 years, and he also became vice chairman of the all-party overseas development group. His was occasionally prepared to defy three-line whips, on the poll tax and on freedom of information legislation. Following the arrival of John Major’s more congenial, generally pro-European administration he became an enthusiastic supporter of the Maastricht treaty.
When Tory Eurosceptics launched an early assault on the European court of justice over limiting working hours, he said: “I certainly would not like to try and convince my electorate that it was not a good thing that they had three weeks’ paid holiday a year. You can’t have a court of law which you pick and choose whether you accept its results.”
Having held Broxtowe comfortably at elections for 14 years, Lester – who received a knighthood in 1996 – was swept away in Tony Blair’s landslide. He launched a parliamentary consultancy instead.
Lester was married twice, firstly to Iris Whitby in 1953. The couple had two children before the marriage was dissolved in 1989. He subsequently married Merrylyn Denis the same year. He is survived by Merrylyn, his children, Simon and Tina, and two stepchildren, Richard and Caroline.
• James Theodore Lester, politician, born 23 May 1932; died 30 October 2021
