My health has been getting a good deal worse since the beginning of this year. I have been getting a lot of pain, particularly from the damage done to my left hip in the IRA terrorist bombing of the Brighton Grand Hotel in Oct 1984. Those injuries, together with my old age (I will be 91 at the end of this month) have slowed me down and left me increasingly dependent on painkillers.

Then the anti-motorist policies of the London authorities have made the chore of driving in from my home in Suffolk to Westminster far worse. I also have to take a carer with me on such a trip and I decided a little while ago that I would resign my membership of the House of Lords at the end of March.

My route to frontline politics

Back in the early years of the first post-war Labour government, it became clear that the Soviet Union had territorial ambitions. The government began a programme both to create a nuclear deterrent and to rebuild our reserve Armed Forces, particularly the Royal Air Force. When I registered for my national service in 1949, I expressed my preference for pilot training in the RAF.  

Two years later, I had completed my training, was discharged and joined Number 604, County of Middlesex Squadron, flying first Vampires and then the Meteor jet fighters. We flew mostly at weekends with an annual fortnight’s “summer camp” usually in Malta. Most of my fellow pilots had seen action during the Second World War. They were also upper-middle class professionals from whom I learned a great deal about the wider world.

In 1956, I got married and stood down from the Royal Air Force, but continued to fly in British Overseas Airways. At that time, the Conservative government of Edward Heath was in difficulties and I wrote to Iain Macleod, the party chairman, telling him what I thought that the government needed to do to put matters right. 

He replied saying simply: “If you are so sure you know what should be done, why do you not come and help us to do it?” From that moment, I determined that I would.

My career plan was to fight the safe Labour seat of Epping, do well but fall short of winning, and then seek a solid Conservative seat to fight at the following election. However, to my surprise and the even greater surprise of the incumbent Labour MP Stan Newens, I took the seat from him, winning with a majority of 2,575 votes. Clearly, it would have been impossible to continue both my flying and political careers, so my life on the flight deck came to an abrupt end. 

Years later, as the minister responsible for civil aviation policy, I was able to draw on my experience of those years when it fell to me to identify the right man to promote to be chairman of the airline. In those years at Westminster, I made some enemies, the Labour leader Michael Foot amongst them. He was stung to call me “a semi-house trained polecat” when I described his defence of the closed shop in industrial relations as “undiluted fascism”.

However, I made far more friends than enemies. Sadly, I lost all too many of those friends to the IRA terrorists – Airey Neave and Ian Gow amongst them – and the Brighton attack also left my wife wheelchair-bound for the last 36 years of her life. 

So it came about that last week Baroness Evans of Bowes Park, the Leader of The House of Lords, very kindly laid on a party to celebrate my half-century of service in the Commons and the Lords and invited my three children and half-a-dozen of my political friends to a lunch time glass or two of bubbly in her office.  

Later, I took my place in the chamber of the Lords for prayers for the last time and then sat through the beginning of question time in the sight of my daughter and two sons in the public gallery. 

Thinking back over those years, I am sure that many of the Thatcher government’s accomplishments were possible only because of my programme of reform of the law governing trade unions. Until those reforms, the unions were exempt from civil law; their members had no right to elect their leaders and in many industries the closed shop allowed them to secure the dismissal of workers who did not pay union dues or obey union instructions. 

Following those reforms, Nissan came to the United Kingdom and then other manufacturers followed. 

War calculations

The free world watches in horror as Vladimir Putin’s forces invade Ukraine. Here in Britain, suddenly none of the possible contenders to replace Boris Johnson in Downing Street are showing any desire to occupy Number 10 and, at least for another few weeks, Mr Johnson is safe there.

Neglect of democracy

The Birmingham Erdington by-election took place with hardly any media comment as Labour’s Paulette Hamilton was elected on 55.5 per cent of the poll (up by 5.2 per cent)  ahead of the Conservatives’ Robert Alden in second place with 36.3 per cent (down by 3.8 per cent) ahead of 10 others, none of whom garnered more than 500 votes.

How little we value what the decent people of Ukraine are having taken from them.