. DR Thorpe

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Author and schoolmaster who wrote acclaimed biographies of British prime ministers including Macmillan and Eden

K M C When the former foreign secretary Lord Hurd of Westwell was asked to nominate the best five political biographies over the past 150 years, he mentioned two by Richard Thorpe, biographies of Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden. The Macmillan book, Supermac (2010), won the 2011 Marsh Biography Award, co-presented by the English-Speaking Union. Thorpe also wrote highly regarded biographies of Selwyn Lloyd (1989) and Alec Douglas-Home (1996). When asked why he specialised in Conservative figures, he replied that his politics were Conservative. Few could match his range of contacts. Readers might have been surprised to learn that his degree was in English not history and that he was employed not in a university but as a schoolmaster in English for 30 years at Charterhouse in Surrey. His first book was on the “nearly men” of British politics. The Uncrowned Prime Ministers (1980) dealt with the careers of Lord Curzon, Austen Chamberlain and RA Butler (“Rab”), all of whom came close to but failed to reach the top. The book was inspired by his chance meeting with Chamberlain’s daughter. When he visited Macmillan’s home at Birch Grove in 1975 and explained why he was interviewing him, the former prime minister smiled and cast aspersions on their academic qualifications. When he later visited Butler, again for the book, Butler’s wife, Mollie, who was not reconciled to her husband missing out on No 10, answered the door. Aware that Thorpe had already talked to Macmillan, she announced that Macmillan “was evil”. During the interview Butler asked how Macmillan had been and which part he had played. “Was he the duke’s son-in-law or the crofter’s great-grandson?” His biographies of Lloyd, Eden, Douglas-Home and Macmillan shed new light on the politics of the postwar period. The reputations of Lloyd and Eden, largely because of Suez, were under a cloud and Thorpe’s books did something to restore their standing.