OBITUARY: T.N.B. SPENCER (61-66)

Tom Spencer (61-66) died from progressive supranuclear palsy on 4th May, 2023 aged 75. He left a wife Liz, two daughters and a stepdaughter. A half-page obituary appeared in The Times on 9th June 2023 and is reproduced here in full with grateful thanks and the newspaper’s permission.

“Leading the Conservative group of MEPs in Brussels from 1994 to 1997 was a thankless task for Tom Spencer, an enthusiastic Europhile. Indeed, after only eight months in the job he had to see off a challenged from colleagues who felt that he was failing to show sufficient support for John Major’s more cautious views on European integration. A welcome distraction was perhaps his chairmanship of the parliament’s foreign affai9rs committee through which he took a keen interest in problems with Algeria, the conflict in Kosovo and threats to the environment.

Spencer, who was once described as ‘a wet with the driest of wits,’ remained determined that the Conservatives should be at the forefront of Europe’s centre-right consensus. ‘It would be impossible to do so in the glorious pointless isolation sometimes urged on us by maverick Conservatives who should know better,’ he declared.

Whatever his politics, this hitherto obscure MEP was soon to become widely known for his distinctly liberal lifestyle. On January 20, 1999, customs officers at Heathrow searched his bags and found gay pornography and two cannabis joints. To his lawyer’s consternation, he later told officers they had overlooked a small quantity of cocaine.

It transpired that Spencer, a family man with a large build and ever larger laugh, was in a gay relationship with Cole Tucker, an American escort and adult-movie actor who appeared in the pornography he was carrying. Tucker, who described his lover as ‘caring and compassionate,’ told how they had first met in a bar in Atlanta, Georgia, and arranged to reconnect in Boston and again in Amsterdam. It was there that another friend gave Spencer the material that led to his downfall and a supposedly confidential customs penalty of £550, details of which soon leaked.

Rather than wriggle, deny or obfuscate, Spencer ‘coughed to the lo’ as one tabloid journalist said in astonishment. To the reporters who descended on his doorstep hoping for yet another ‘Tory sleeze’ story, he simply declared: ‘It’s all true. Now would you like a cup of tea?’ Inside the house he lit a Havana cigar and amiably posed for pictures. To judge by the onslaught of flowers and cards, the public were largely sympathetic. The people of Surrey, whom he had represented for a decade, were not so liberal and with another European election imminent, he stepped down as their candidate.

The revelations about Spencer’s bisexuality came as no surprise to his wife Liz. ‘I always knew, long before he told me, that Tom was gay,’ she said while holding a mug with the words ‘Sexy beast’ emblazoned on it. ‘But it did not bother me in the sense that I did not think it would interfere with us.’ Like the song from the musical Les Miserable, she added, ‘there are some things better left unspoken, better left unsaid.’

Thomas Newnham Bayley Spencer was born in Nottingham in 1948, the son of Captain Thomas Spencer, a moustachioed former Army officer who had pursued his future wife Ann (née Readett-Bayley) on horseback across the Greek mountains near Delphi. ‘My father’s family was very pro-empire,’ his son recalled, adding that his own pro-European views were formed while visiting a war cemetery in France during a family holiday. ‘My father said to us: ‘I don’t know what you have to do to stop this happening again but whatever it is, do it.’’

He was educated at the Nautical College, Pangbourne, though any dreams of joining the Royal Navy were dashed by chronic seasickness. After a year with the family engineering business in Hampshire and chairing the New Forest Young Conservatives, he read Economics and Accountancy at the University of Southampton. As chairman of the university’s Conservative Association, he wrote to The Times in 1969 explaining that a group of fellow students who had appeared on University Forum on BBC One were not representative of Southampton’s student body as a whole. 

He ran for the chairmanship of the Federation of Conservative Students, standing against Neil Hamilton who became MP for Tatton and was also to be embroiled in scandal, and Andrew Neill, a future editor of the Sunday Times. Neil, who many years later interviewed his friend, won and the politically compulsive Spencer served as his vice-chairman.

On graduating, he joined the accountancy firm Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co (now KPMG) but left in 975 having twice failed his accountancy exams and then spent six months assisting Sir Con O’Neil, director of Britain in Europe, during that year’s Common Market referendum campaign. He then worked for Senator John Tower of Texas before being recruited by the J Walter Thompson advertising agency to help on the Guinness account. Meanwhile, in 1973, he was awarded the Robert Schuman silver medal for service to Europe.

At the 1979 European elections, Spencer won Derbyshire for the Conservatives after running a campaign challenging what he called Labour’s ‘criminally irresponsible’ desire to withdraw from the bloc. In office, he campaigned vigorously for Derbyshire industry and became known as ‘the Tory with a heart.’

Four months after the election he married Liz Maltby whom he had known since their student days though in the meantime she had been married and divorced. Liz, who became a company director, survives him with their daughters Venetia and Sophie, and a stepdaughter Lorna.

After five years the voters of Derbyshire ousted him in favour of Geoff Hoon, the Labour candidate in an election seen as a test of Margaret Thatcher’s popularity. He found a new berth as associate dean of Templeton College, Oxford, lecturing on European affairs to senior business people, before returning to Europe as the representative for Surrey West in 1989 and Surrey in 1994. The family now lived at Churt, between Haslemere and Farnham in Surrey in an 11-bedroom manor built in 1895 for Sir Gilbert Murray, another politician with international leanings who drafted the League of Nations covenant.

Although Spencer spoke no foreign languages he worked hard in Europe and had immense patience especially with European allies. He crossed swords with the Chinese ambassador to Europe who did not want the foreign affairs committee to hear the views of the Taiwan foreign minister, and the Americans who rebuffed his questions about a sensitive US project allegedly linked to mind control and weather modification. ‘Lo and behold, about six months later customs just happened to pick his bags to search,’ noted the Scottish author Robin Ramsay in his book Politics and Paranoia (2008).

After stepping down from public office he became professor of global governance at the University of Surrey, chairman or president of several pro-European bodies and think tanks including the European Centre for Public Affairs, and contributed to books on the subject. In later years his great passion was warning about climate change.

When Spencer and his wife downsized to a smaller home in 2013, he explained to The Times how their partnership had endured. ‘We’re children of the 1960s, we designed our own marriage and stuck to it,’ he said. As for his high-profile ejection from the heart of European politics, he simply shrugged it off with an unruffled smile. ‘It was just the old cliché about spending more time with your family.’”

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Robin Knight (56-61) adds: “At the NCP, Tom Spencer became a Cadet Captain in Illawarra Division and a member of Form V1. In 1966 he won the Open Prizes for Geography, Divinity and English and also the Cunningham of Hyndhope Prize for Naval History. While an MEP, he visited the College on several occasions to discuss European affairs with the pupils.”