John Horam, Lord Horam, who has died aged 87, was a rare political figure: he represented three different parties in the House of Commons and served as a government minister for two of them. His career spanned Labour in the 1970s, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 1980s, and the Conservatives in the 1990s, making him one of the most peripatetic MPs of modern times.
Born in Preston, Lancashire, on 7 March 1939, Horam was the son of Catherine (née Harkness), who ran a dress shop and a newsagent's at various times, and Sydney Horam, a fitter with Leyland Motors. He was educated at the fee-paying Silcoates School in Wakefield, where he became head boy, and studied economics at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. After university, he joined the marketing department of Rowntree's chocolate factory in York, where he played a small part in developing the After Eight mint in the early 1960s.
Early Career and Political Beginnings
Horam later worked as a journalist for the Financial Times and the Economist before founding the Commodities Research Unit (now the CRU Group) in London with a colleague, Robert Perlman, supplying data to mining companies. He had joined the Labour Party at the age of 15 after hearing a speech by Hugh Gaitskell, who would become party leader in 1955. His politics were consistently on the right wing of the party, as an economic free marketeer and opponent of incomes policy.
Elected as MP for Gateshead West in 1970, Horam initially held positions that he would later change, including being a Tribunite anti-Common Market candidate. Over time, he became a supporter of the European Union, but also advocated capital punishment, opposed divorce law reform, and opposed lowering the homosexual age of consent.
Ministerial Roles and Defections
In a 1976 reshuffle, Prime Minister James Callaghan appointed Horam a junior minister in the Department for Transport, serving under Bill Rodgers, who would later become a leader of the breakaway SDP. During his tenure, Horam began piloting legislation to make seatbelts compulsory, a measure that was lost when the 1979 general election was called, and he presided over the widening of a stretch of the M1.
After Labour's defeat in 1979, Horam grew increasingly disenchanted with the party's leftward drift. He served in Denis Healey's shadow Treasury team but left the frontbench after Michael Foot became leader. In January 1981, he became the first MP to join the Gang of Four's Council for Social Democracy, and two months later, he was one of the first 13 to join the SDP. His constituency was abolished in a parliamentary reorganisation, and when he fought Newcastle Central in the 1983 election, he came only third.
By the mid-1980s, Horam was continuing his political journey. He declared that the SDP was becoming increasingly like a "mark 2 Labour party" with higher spending, higher taxation, and an incomes policy, calling it "a botched job – Labour without the loonies."
Joining the Conservatives and Later Life
After discreet talks with Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, the party chairman, in March 1987, Horam announced he was joining the Conservatives, drawn by their "sensible and realistic economic strategy which was showing signs of success." David Owen, the SDP leader, said he was sad but relaxed about the defection. Although it was too late to find a seat for that year's general election, Horam was back in 1992 as MP for the Conservative suburban London constituency of Orpington.
In 1995, John Major appointed him junior minister for public services and science, and eight months later moved him to the Department of Health. Still contrary, he had spoken out against the imposition of VAT on fuel and joined early Tory opponents of the euro.
The Conservatives' defeat in 1997 ended his ministerial career. He subsequently served as chairman of the Commons' environmental audit committee, as a member of the foreign affairs select committee, and on the backbenchers' 1922 Committee. He retired from the Commons at the 2010 general election and was given a peerage three years later.
Horam was married twice: in 1977 to Iris Crawley, and after their divorce, in 1987 to Judith Jackson, a former Guardian and Sunday Times motoring correspondent. She survives him, together with her two sons, Lincoln and Fraser, from an earlier relationship.
