Abstract
Arthur (Lord) Cockfield was one of the unlikeliest political entrepreneurs of recent times. Described in Hugo Young’s biography of Margaret Thatcher as ‘eccentric, apolitical and unelected’ (Young, 1989, p. 301), he was more of a policy enthusiast than a politician. His qualifications for national and European office included an improbable combination of jobs in industry, quangoes, the civil service and voluntary associations. But not once did he ever hold an elected public position. He had been Chairman of Boots the chemists, an Inland Revenue Commissioner, Chair of the Price Commission and even President of the Statistical Society. He had sat on the Council of the Confederation of British Industry and on the National Economic Development Council. In so far as he can be said to have had a ‘political career’, it did not begin until he was 62 when he became a junior Treasury Minister in the 1979 Conservative government. It did not take off until he was 65, when he was brought into the Cabinet as Trade Secretary, probably for no better reason than to ‘keep a seat warm’ until Thatcher was better placed to shape her team as she wanted. And it did not reach its brief apogee until he was appointed, at the age of 68, for what was to turn out as a single four-year term (1985–9) as one of Britain’s two European Commissioners.
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© 2000 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Lord, C. (2000). Lord Cockfield: a European Commissioner as a Political Entrepreneur. In: Theakston, K. (eds) Bureaucrats and Leadership. Transforming Government. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333982884_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333982884_7
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