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Tributes: Earl Jellicoe

My Lords, it is always difficult to pay tribute to someone whom one did not know personally. On the Liberal Democrat Benches, we are fortunate in having a keeper of the collective memory in my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester. She is often a ruthless assessor of your Lordships but, when I asked her about Lord Jellicoe, she said without hesitation that he was a man respected and admired by all sides of the House. She went further and said that in her view, and as was indicated by the Lord President, his work on committee reform was the real start of House of Lords reform. He was the son of a war hero, but the DSO and MC clearly did not come with the rations. For those who are not regular Guardian readers, I shall quote to the House today’s obituary in that paper: ““When the war came, rather than exploit his name in the Royal Navy, he opted for the Coldstream Guards, serving later with No. 8 Commando and the 1st Special Air Service Regiment. He won the DSO for his part in a sabotage attack on a Nazi airfield at Heraklion, in Crete. He was parachuted on to the island, avoided capture by pretending to be a Cretan drunk, worked his way into the bomb-proof aircraft shelters and laid charges which destroyed 16 aircraft””. That would not look out of place in a James Bond film, yet he was one of our colleagues in this House. For my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter, from her childhood, George Jellicoe was a family friend. She swears that there are many elderly Greeks who today are convinced that George Jellicoe liberated Athens after he commandeered a bicycle to race ahead of liberating forces to reach the appropriately named Hotel Grand Britannia first. The Guardian obituary, to which I referred, lists him as having backed the abolition of hanging in the 1960s against the opinion of most of his party, and as clashing with the then Lord Salisbury over support to Rhodesia at the time of UDI and with the Duke of Norfolk over stem cell research. He was not a ““yes”” man. The Independent sums him up as a soldier, diplomat, politician and businessman, concluding: ““Few public figures have led such a varied and exciting life as George Jellicoe””. As with all long lives, there were, as the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, indicated, both lows and highs, but he was a great servant of his country in war and in peace and he was also a great servant of this House.