Geoffrey Rippon, Baron Rippon of Hexham

Geoffrey Rippon (1970)

Aubrey Geoffrey Frederick Rippon, Baron Rippon of Hexham PC QC (born May 28, 1924 in Surbiton , Surrey , † January 28, 1997 in Broomfield , Bridgwater , Somerset ) was a British lawyer and politician of the Conservative Party who worked for 30 years without interruptions Member of the House of Commons and Minister on several occasions. After leaving the House of Commons, he was raised to the nobility in 1987 under the Life Peerages Act 1958 as a Life Peer with the title Baron Rippon of Hexham and was a member of the House of Lords until his death .

Life

Degree, lawyer and local politician

Rippon graduated after attending the prestigious King's College Taunton studying law at Brasenose College of the University of Oxford . During his studies he was chairman of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1942 and President of the Federation of University Conservative Associations in 1943 . After the end of the war, he began his political involvement in local politics while still a student when he was elected as a candidate of the Conservative Party for a member of the city council of Surbiton, of which he was a member until 1954.

In 1948 he was admitted to the bar ( Inns of Court ) of Middle Temple and then took up a position as a barrister . For his lawyer's merits, he later became Attorney-General (Queen's Counsel) appointed.

In the general election of February 23, 1950 and October 25, 1951 , Rippon ran for the Conservative Tories in the constituency of Shoreditch and Finsbury for a seat in Parliament, but was clearly defeated by Ernest Thurtle of the Labor Party with 53.2 to 18.6 percent (1950 ) and 72.6 to 27.4 percent (1951). In addition, he was Mayor of Surbiton between 1951 and 1952 and was then elected a member of the London County Council (LCC), in which he represented the interests of Chelsea until 1964 . At times he was chairman of the Conservative Party parliamentary group .

Member of the House of Commons and Junior Minister

In the general election of May 26, 1955 , Rippon was elected for the first time as a member of the House of Commons and represented in this until the elections of October 15, 1964 the constituency of Norwich South . At the beginning of his career, between 1956 and 1959, he served as the private parliamentary secretary of a minister.

On September 22, 1959 he took over his first office as junior minister, namely as Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Aviation (Parliamentary Secretary for Aviation) . As such, he was until October 9, 1961 one of the closest collaborators of the then Aviation Minister Duncan Sandys and Peter Thorneycroft . He then moved as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Housing and Local Government (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Housing and Local Government) and was there until July 16, 1962 one of the closest collaborators of the then Minister for Housing and Local Government, Charles Hill . In this function he was able to draw on his many years of experience in local politics.

Minister in the Macmillan and Douglas-Home governments; electoral defeat in 1964

On July 16, 1962, Rippon was appointed by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to succeed John Hope as Minister for Works , but was not a member of the Cabinet as such. Nevertheless, he became a member of the Privy Council in 1962 .

This only changed after Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home took office , who appointed him Minister of Public Buildings and Works to Cabinet Minister on October 20, 1963 . He held this ministerial post until the end of Douglas-Home's tenure on October 16, 1964.

Previously, not only had the Conservative Party lost to the opposition Labor Party in the October 15, 1964 general election , but Rippon himself suffered a personal defeat in his constituency, Norwich South . He lost his parliamentary seat by just 611 votes to his Labor challenger Christopher Norwood . This received 17,973 votes (50.9 percent), while he himself received 17,362 votes (49.1 percent). He then focused back on his work as a lawyer.

Re-elected to the House of Commons and Minister in the Heath Administration

In the general election of March 31, 1966 , Rippon ran again for the Conservative Party, this time running as the successor to Rupert Speir in the traditionally more conservative constituency of Hexham . He represented this until he renounced a new candidacy in the elections on June 11, 1987 in the lower house.

A staunch supporter of Europe and Britain's accession to the European Community , Rippon was chairman of the British delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Western European Union (WEU) from 1967 to 1974 . In addition, he was from 1969 to 1970 the shadow cabinet of his party as shadow defense minister.

After the election victory of the conservative Tories in the general election of June 18, 1970 , Rippon was appointed by Prime Minister Edward Heath on June 20, 1970 to be Minister of Technology in his government. When the unexpected death of Chancellor Iain Macleod on July 20, 1970, necessitated a reshuffle of the cabinet just one month after the Heath government took office, Rippon took over the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on July 25, 1970 from the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anthony Barber , while John Davies succeeded him as Secretary of Technology.

As part of a further reshuffle of the Heath Cabinet, Rippon succeeded Peter Walker as Secretary of State for the Environment on November 5, 1972 . He held this ministerial office until Heath ended on March 4, 1974 after losing the general election on February 28, 1974 .

Again in the opposition and member of the House of Lords

After the election defeat, Rippon was appointed shadow foreign minister in the shadow cabinet of the Conservative Party on March 4th by the now opposition leader Heath . However, he held this office for less than a year until February 11, 1975 when Margaret Thatcher succeeded Heath as chairman (leader) of the conservative Toris. He then retired from top political positions and remained a member of the lower house as a backbencher .

Rippon, who was also a senior member of the Conservative Monday Club , was President of the European Documentation and Information Center (CEDI) between 1979 and 1982 .

After his renouncement in the general election of June 11, 1987, Rippon was named Baron Rippon of Hexham , of Balmashannar in the Royal Burgh of by a letters patent dated October 5, 1987 under the Life Peerages Act 1958 Forfar, raised to the nobility and belonged to the House of Lords as a member until his death.

He was also director of Maxwell Communication Corporation (MCC) , a media company founded by Robert Maxwell , from 1986 and 1992 . During this time, the investigations into the financial situation of the group and into the unexplained circumstances of Maxwell's death took place. The media company had reached its greatest expansion in 1990 through the acquisitions of various companies and publishers, but it was also heavily indebted. Pergamon Press and Maxwell Directories had to sell Maxwell to Elsevier for £ 440 million in 1991 in order to service current loans. Robert Maxwell himself disappeared in 1991 in an unexplained manner naked from his yacht "Lady Ghislaine" in calm water. His body was recovered from the sea near Tenerife by a Spaniard.

Most recently, Baron Rippon was Pro Chancellor of the University of London since 1994 .

His marriage to Ann Leyland in 1946 resulted in three daughters and one son.

Sources and web links

• Una McGovern (Ed.): Chambers Biographical Dictionary . 7th edition. Chambers, Edinburgh 2002, ISBN 0-550-10051-2 , p. 1288.
• Geoffrey Rippon at Hansard (English)
• Entry in Cracroft's Peerage
• Entry in Leigh Rayment Peerage
• Aubrey Geoffrey Frederick Rippon, Baron Rippon of Hexham, on thepeerage.com , accessed August 18, 2015.