Christopher Mayhew

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Christopher Paget Mayhew, Baron Mayhew (born June 12, 1915 in London , † January 7, 1997 ibid) was a British politician. He sat initially as a member of the Labor Party from 1945 to 1950 and from 1951 to 1974 in parliament . Then he left the Labor Party and became a liberal . In 1981 he was promoted to Life Peer and now as Baron Mayhew member of the House of Lords .

Early life

Christopher Mayhew attended the nearby Hertford Haileybury Private School and the Christ Church College in Oxford as a scholarship holder. At Oxford he became the President of the Oxford Union , a prominent debating club that provides valuable training for future politicians. According to his autobiography, he took a vacation in Moscow in 1934 . During the Second World War , he entered the British intelligence service in 1940 and rose to the rank of major .

Political career

Mayhew was first elected to parliament as a candidate for the constituency of South Norfolk in the 1945 general election. In 1945 he became State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry, served under Ernest Bevin and took a decidedly pro-Arab attitude. He lost his seat in Parliament in 1950, but returned there the next year when he won the seat of the late Bevin in the 1951 by-election for Woolwich East.

During the 13 years that the Labor Party was in opposition from 1951 to 1964, Mayhew presented it on television, primarily as a commentator on the BBC and as a host of party political programs. He announced Labor's first broadcast in 1951, discussing it with Sir Hartley Shawcross . Mayhew also became known as one of the Labor Party's fiercest opponents of unilateral nuclear disarmament . He also served as shadow war minister from 1960 to 1961 and as his party's foreign policy spokesman from 1961 to 1964.

When the Labor Party came to power in 1964, Mayhew became Secretary of State for Defense and was known informally as Secretary of the Navy. However, after Prime Minister Harold Wilson's administration decided to shift the British Air Force from carrier aircraft to land-based aircraft and to end the CAV-01 aircraft carrier program, Mayhew and First Sea Lord David Luce resigned in 1966.

In 1973, Mayhew offered £ 5,000 in reward for producing evidence that Nasser had declared "to drive the Jews into the sea." Mayhew later repeated this offer in the House of Commons , expanding it to include any statement by an Arab leader that could be interpreted as support for genocide . He reserved the right to decide for himself the authenticity of alleged statements and their meaning. As a result, he received several letters from complainants with alleged quotes from Arab leaders, all of which he believed to be bogus. One of the applicants, Warren Bergson, sued Mayhew. The case came to the High Court in February 1976. Bergson was unable to produce evidence of Nasser's alleged statement and admitted that even after thorough research, he had not been able to find an explanation from an Arab leader that could be classified as a genocide call.

Transfer to the Liberal Party

Mayhew liked the Labor politics less and less under Harold Wilson and therefore switched to the Liberal Party in 1974. This made him the first MP to defend the Liberals in several decades. In the early general election in October 1974 , he ran not for the constituency of Woolwich East, but for that of Bath in order not to split his former party in the first-mentioned constituency. In his candidacies for Bath he was unsuccessful in 1974 and 1979.

On July 6, 1981, Mayhew was raised under the title Baron Mayhew, of Wimbledon in Greater London to life peer and subsequently defense spokesman for the Liberals in the House of Lords .

Other activities

Mayhew also served as an attorney for the mentally ill and was chairman of the National Association for Mental Health (MIND) from 1992 to 1997 . He was also the author of several books; Among other things, he wrote the pro-Palestinian work Publish It Not: The Middle East Cover-Up together with Michael Adams in 1975 and in 1987 his autobiography Time To Explain .

Panorama experiment

In 1955, Mayhew took part in an experiment that was to be broadcast on a documentary on the BBC television series Panorama , but it never happened. Under the supervision of his friend, the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond , Mayhew took 400  mg of a psychedelic drug , mescaline hydrochloride , and was filmed during his trip. Audio samples were used in the psychedelic dance tracks Mayhew Speaks Out and Christopher Mayhew Says by the British band The Shamen , and parts of the images were incorporated into the BBC documentary LSD - The Beyond Within (1986).

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Leigh Rayment's Historical List of MPs - Constituencies beginning with “N” (part 2) ( Memento of the original from October 6, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.leighrayment.com
  2. ^ Frederick Walter Scott Craig: British Parliamentary election results 1918–1949 . 3rd edition, Chichester: Parliamentary Research Services, 1983, ISBN 0-900178-06-X , p. 434.
  3. ^ Hansard , October 18, 1973.
  4. ^ The Guardian , Sept. 9, 1974.
  5. ↑ London Gazette . No. 48673, HMSO, London, 9 July 1981, p. 9091 ( PDF , English).
  6. ↑ Hidden Archives : Panorama: The Mescaline Experiment .
personal data
SURNAME Mayhew, Christopher
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mayhew, Christopher Paget, Baron Mayhew (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British politician
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH January 7, 1997
Place of death London