Professor James Alexandre Thomas Douglas (1919-2004)
was the son of Lt.-Col. Herbert Archibald Douglas and Marie Louise
Gorisse. He was invested as a Officer, Order of the British Empire
(O.B.E.)
James Douglas played an important role in the
Conservative Research Department when the Tories' style of consensus
politics had a strong appeal for the electorate, between Churchill's
victory of 1951 and the defeat of Edward Heath in 1974.
During
this time he made two major contributions to the modernisation of the
party's practical operations.
He devised the rules introduced in
1965 to provide for the election of the party leader, though an
egregious MP, Humphry Berkeley, stole the public credit. He also
vigorously promoted the use of opinion polls - at which his predecessors
had looked askance - though he deplored the mumbo-jumbo that was so
often attached to them.
It was thus that the party discovered a
previously neglected element of the electorate, the C2s, whom Mrs
Thatcher later courted so successfully with the sale of council houses.
From the moment he joined the department's offices, overlooking St
James's Park, in 1951 after many of its post-war luminaries had left to
find parliamentary seats, Douglas played the part of a slightly
unworldly professor to perfection, and widespread delight. At the same
time he established himself at the forefront of discussions of policy
and strategy where the most important work was done.
Although
never zealous in his Tory faith, he was admirably forthright in his
advice; a Douglas memorandum was always awaited with keen anticipation
by colleagues and some trepidation by ministers. One draft of the 1966
election manifesto drew his caustic comment: "It could equally well have
been put out by the Labour Party."
As the election of February
1974 drew near on Heath's ill-chosen issue of "Who governs Britain?",
Douglas, by then head of the department, argued passionately that the
party needed a clear bold message. Above all, he argued, it must replace
"fussy little defences of the latest stage of the Heath government's
counter-inflation policy".
"If we outlive this day and come safe
home," he asked, "will we indeed rise up and stand atiptoe at the name
Stage Three?" It was his misfortune that, after years of enlivening
internal Tory debate, he lost his post in the reorganisation that
followed the first 1974 election defeat. However, Douglas gave way very
graciously to his successor, Chris Patten, for whom he entertained a
very high regard.
James Alexandre Thomas Douglas was born on July
22 1919 at Simla, where his father commanded a regiment of the Indian
Army. He was brought up in Paris before being educated by the Jesuits at
Beaumont College in Berkshire.
After reading PPE at New College,
Oxford, he took up a post at the Board of Trade where he had
responsibility for clothes rationing. For years afterwards he embodied
the war-time lack of choice, always wearing striped trousers and a black
jacket. Thus attired, he cut an incongruous figure on his Lambretta
motor scooter, weaving dangerously through the traffic with his mind on
political strategy.
Yet he was as conscious as any future
Thatcherite of the need for business to give value for money. Douglas
became a founder member of the Consumers' Association, where he helped
to launch the magazine Which? In 1963, he was appointed OBE.
Throughout his career in the research department, Douglas remained
largely unknown, and took little interest in life as it was led in the
constituencies. His heart was not gladdened by Thatcherism. One former
Cabinet minister was heard to muse, around 1992, "I wonder whether any
of the five surviving CRD Directors voted Conservative at the last
election?"
After leaving the research department in 1977, Douglas
held senior academic posts at Yale, Columbia and the Northwestern
University before taking up, in 1986, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at
Princeton, though with his sharp approach to politics he could have had
little sympathy with that President's vague principles for a new world
order.
James Douglas retired to Hampstead, where he died on
September 20, 2004. He is survived by his widow, whom he had married on
31 March 1951, the former
Mary Tew, daughter of Gilbert Charles Tew and
Phyllis Margaret Twomey. She was a professor of anthropology at
University College, London. His two sons, James and Philip, and
daughter, Janet, also survived him.
He also leaves a fine
example to politicians as a whole - generally a self-satisfied breed; he
never took himself too seriously and liked to mock gently their
pretensions.
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