REALIGNMENT OF THE RADICAL DEAD
A fairly popular deadpool pick in recent years, Lord Chalfont (or Alun Gwynne Jones as he was before his peerage in 1964) has died shortly after turning 100 last month. New centenarians of late have no staying power. A World War Two veteran who fought in Burma for three years, Jones remained in the army until the late 50s and won the Military Cross for actions in Malaysia. Retired from the army in 1961, he became a Lord and then minister in the Foreign Office in Harold Wilsons government, where he tried to convince the peoples of the Falkland Islands to give up being British. Later he resigned from the Labour Party, claiming it wasn’t radical enough for his liking. Yes, that’s right, one of the most progressive governments in the last 300 years of British politics wasn’t radical enough for Lord Chalfont. And people claim the left is never happy…
Chalfont went to support the Liberal Party under Jeremy Thorpe, write several history books on the Napoleonic Wars, and was for a decade the Father of the House in the Lords. He also wrote for the Tory Party conference newspaper in 1985, as presumably they were the right sort of realigning radical lefties…
Chalfont is a unique hit for I Told You I Was Ill. Well, he was, and now he’s 7 points to you.
Alun Gwynne Jones
5 December 1919 – 10 January 2020
Unique hit