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Tributes: Lord Cockfield

My Lords, we on these Benches associate ourselves with the memory of a wonderfully anti-political politician. He was one of the most understated people, whom one nevertheless heard talk with an underlying passion about political issues. As I got to know him in his later years, I found that you had to listen very hard to catch the underlying humour of some of the things that he said. He loved to pretend that he was dry and technical, even when he was not. He was chairman of the Price Commission under the Conservative Government of 1970 to 1974. My noble friend Lady Williams has reminded me that she re-appointed him when the Labour Government came in because, although he was clearly a Conservative, he was recognised to have an entirely fair-minded and balanced approach to competition. The most remarkable memory of him was his achievement in introducing the single European market. It was perfect for him because the 1992 programme was a collection of extremely dry and technical issues, but he managed, with the help of President Delors and others, to package them into a politically saleable programme. He had a remarkable rapport with Jacques Delors as President of the Commission—remarkable because they were such very different characters, who nevertheless got on extraordinarily well. Madame Delors and Monica Cockfield also got on remarkably well in that peculiar world of Brussels. There were accusations in the British press that he had gone native when he went over there. He had not, but he did see that there was a problem to be dealt with and that it was his job to deal with it. He was much more adventurous than many people knew. He once told us that he and wife had gone around the world in 1968 on a cargo boat and, when they were in the South China Sea during the Tet offensive, their cargo boat, like others in the area, was asked to call in and stand off the Mekong Delta just in case there were large numbers of Americans to be evacuated from the mainland. So their journey was rather delayed. He had a passionate commitment in his later years to informing the younger generation about the real benefits of European co-operation, and the Lady Monica Cockfield Trust provided, in a particularly close relationship with the University of Sussex and the Sussex European Institute, scholarships for young British students to learn more about Europe. I enjoyed many conversations with him in this House and I, like many others, will miss him.