A Tribute to Derek Conway

On Friday, the funeral of former Conservative MP Derek Conway was held in his beloved Northumberland. In the end, I was unable to go, which was such a shame as Derek was one of those people who was a one-off, one of life’s most positive and generous people. He was great company, and although I wouldn’t pretend to be one of his closest personal friends, I remember some quite deep and meaningful conversations, and some hilarious Whatsapp exchanges in recent years.

The last time I saw him was at my Margaret Thatcher booklaunch last June. He told me afterwards that people he had known for years hadn’t recognised him as he’d been on Mounjaro. Given there were a couple of hundred people there, we didn’t have much time to talk, but I remember we promised to meet up soon and have a proper catch-up. It never happened. In February, he was diagnosed with a terminal illness and given less than a year to live. He died on 5 May, at home with his darling wife Colette and their three children, Henry, Freddie and Claudia. He was only 73. I’ve just looked up his last message to me on Whatsapp. It came on 10 April and read:

“Fading rather quickly🤕 Around 9st now (not the 16 you’ll recall!) They gave me less than a year on mid-Feb so the clock is ticking down steadily. YOU ENJOY EVERY DAY💪Dx”.

At that point I had planned to go and see him when I was going to be in the North East in mid May. Despite that message I didn’t realise he thought the end was imminent. Andrew Mitchell and David Davis went to see him around that time for a final reunion of the band of brothers that became lifelong friends in the whips office during the Major government.

I didn’t know Derek at that point. He had been elected as MP for Shrewsbury in 1983, but I didn’t come across him when I worked in Parliament in the mid 1980s, or subsequently when working as a lobbyist in the 1990s. I do remember, however, his colleague Patrick Nicholls asking me in 1997 if I knew of any jobs going, as he was keen to help Derek following the loss of his seat in the Blair landslide. Derek subsequently became chief executive of the Cats Protection League, transforming it and increasing its turnover from £5 million to £27 million in only five years.

I first got to know Derek in the early months of 2005 when I attended a weekend meeting at Andrew Mitchell’s home in Nottinghamshire, ostensibly to discuss a potential David Davis leadership campaign, followed in late March by a similar event over dinner at the Conway’s magnificent flat near Westminster Cathedral. Believe me, dinners at the Conways were always memorable.

Derek’s public reputation and his actual real character were at odds with one another. During the leadership campaign itself, Derek and Andrew were often described in the newspapers as bullies. They were accused of issuing threats to Tory MPs that if they didn’t get on board with the DD campaign, they wouldn’t be rewarded with shadow ministerial positions. If that side of Derek really existed, I never witnessed it. As DD’s chief of staff during that period. Indeed, quite the opposite. All I saw was a man full of the joys of life, often displaying a wicked sense of humour, and someone who was very comfortable in his own skin. It proved to be a difficult six months for me, as I was a square peg in a round hole. Given at that stage I didn’t know him well, he was incredibly kind to me and was full of wise and advice, especially in how to handle the more difficult personalities involved in the campaign.

Back in April 2023, I met Derek for dinner in Hexham. I was there for the literary festival and had had a nightmare journey up the M1 and A1. I had gone almost blind in one eye half way up the M1 and had no idea if it would be long lasting. Derek shared some of his own health concerns and we joked about we were becoming typical old people – obsessed with health issues. We reflected on the DD campaign, then 18 years in the past, but my abiding memory of the dinner is that it was full of laughter.

Andrew Mitchell gave the eulogy at Derek’s funeral, and I can think of no better way of ending this tribute by quoting from it.

“For reasons I cannot immediately recall, he ended up presenting on television a book review show. This, as the title suggests, involved reading the book or books that were the subject of the show each week – which Derek always did – and the guests he invited on his show to discuss the books were supposed to do likewise. On the occasion that Iain Dale and I were his guests, it quickly became apparent that neither I nor Iain had actually opened the book in question. However, with magnificent sang froid, Derek managed to deliver the half-hour programme.”

I had forgotten all about this, but when Andrew phoned me to confirm the details, it all came flooding back. Sadly, neither of us can recall the book that remained unread by two of the three of us!

Everyone who counted Derek as a friend can’t quite believe we’ll never hear his gentle north east accent again, or hear that wonderful chortle. He enriched our lives, and that isn’t a bad legacy.

The Times has done a full obituary of Derek, which you can read HERE.