Nothing in his previous 30 years of political activity quite prepared Quentin Davies, Lord Davies of Stamford, who has died aged 80, for the intensity of the emotional anguish to which he subjected himself in advance of his decision to abandon his membership of the Conservative party and cross the floor of the House of Commons to sit on the Labour benches.
His defection in June 2007 was prompted by despair about the mounting antipathy towards Europe that had been steadily growing throughout his 20 years as a Tory MP, in direct conflict with his own passionate conviction about the need for Britain to remain within a united European Union.
The revelation of this apostasy was
timed by Gordon Brown’s media team
to coincide with exquisite precision for the day Brown became prime minister in succession toTony Blair
, thus adding an intended air of hoopla to the changeover at the head of government.Davies
was primed to set the scene by announcing his defection in a letter, published the night before Brown took his new place in the top spot on the Treasury bench,unequivocally denouncing David Cameron’s leadership of the Conservatives
for the previous two years.It provided a degree of drama on the day, but defectors are never entirely embraced within the bosom of their new political family and are generally despised by their previous one. Davies had been well aware of this when wrestling with his conscience, but had nevertheless become convinced that he could not remain a Conservative and also sleep easily at night.
He cut an unlikely figure as a Labour MP. He was an imposing character who wore pinstriped shirts as loud as his voice and owned an 18th-century manor house in his Lincolnshire constituency. When the MPs’ expenses scandal broke in 2009 he was revealed to have claimed £10,000 for repairs to windows in this “second home”, Frampton Hall (his first home being a London flat)
and £20,700 the previous year for maintenance of a bell tower
– a figure subsequently reduced to £5,376.In 1991, he had been fined £1,500 on two charges of animal cruelty after a shepherd in his employment had failed to feed sheep on his estate; he had sacked the man responsible, but nevertheless subsequently faced calls of “Baa” from the Labour benches in the Commons whenever he rose to speak. It did not puncture his self-confidence. He was an assiduous MP at Westminster and also travelled widely with parliamentary groups linked with other European states.
He had previously demonstrated an adherence to principle over the Scott report into the scandal over the sale of arms to Iraq in 1996 when he called for the resignation of one of the ministers implicated and was one of only two Tory MPs to vote against John Major’s government, thus bringing the administration within a single vote of defeat.
By then he already had a reputation as something of an independent-minded maverick and this rebellion scored him coveted awards, including Guardian readers’ personality of the year and the Spectator’s backbencher of the year in 1997.
A former merchant banker and main board director of Morgan Grenfell before his election to parliament, he was a taxation expert and proved an impressively knowledgable member of the Treasury select committee from 1992 to 1998.
Although he played an enthusiastic role in the fight against the anti-Europeans within the Conservative parliamentary party, characterised as
during his beleaguered premiership, Davies never found favour withMargaret Thatcher
’s successor. His Tory colleagues at the time believed it was his failure to secure ministerial office which embittered such an openly ambitious man and subsequently led to his defection.After Major’s departure, he had been appointed to the opposition frontbench by
and was a spokesman on social security (1998-99), the Treasury (1999-2000) and defence (2000-01), andIain Duncan Smith
made him shadow Northern Ireland spokesman (2001-03), but thereafter he returned to the backbenches and joined the select committee on international development, where he was a member until 2007.On crossing the floor of the house he strenuously asserted that it had not been with the promise of a job in the Brown government, but in the event had only to wait just over a year before joining the defence team as the junior minister with responsibility for defence equipment and support. He was in office from 2008 until Labour lost power two years later, a period during which he was called to answer for the inadequacy of defence equipment used by troops deployed in Afghanistan, notably
, nicknamed the “mobile coffin”.Davies was born in Oxford, the elder son of a Labour-voting doctor, Michael Davies, and his wife, Thelma (nee Butler). He was privately educated at the Dragon school, Oxford, and Leighton Park, Reading, and won a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1966 with a first-class history degree.
He was awarded a year’s fellowship at Harvard before joining the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1967. He spoke Russian and was posted to Moscow for three years in 1969 and then in 1974 took up his banking career with Morgan Grenfell. He became the bank’s director general and president in France and was head of European corporate finance until he became an MP.
His other business interests included serving as a director of Dewe Rogerson International (1987-95), and as an adviser at NatWest (1993-99) and the Royal Bank of Scotland (1999-2003). He was a member of the council at Lloyds of London (2004-07).
Davies’s political interests started at Cambridge where he was treasurer of the university Conservative Association. In 1975, during the referendum on continuing membership of the then EEC, he chaired the City in Europe committee. He first stood unsuccessfully for the Commons in 1977 in the Birmingham Ladywood byelection and was elected for Stamford and Spalding in 1987. His constituency boundaries were redrawn as Grantham and Stamford in 1997.
In 2010 he retired as an MP at the election and was promoted to the
in the dissolution honours list. He was a member of the Lords European select committee from 2013 to 2016 and after Brexit of the European Union external affairs subcommittee (2019-23). He narrowly survived a serious road accident in 2020 and resigned from the Lords in 2023.He is survived by his wife, Chantal (nee Tamplin), whom he married in 1983, and their sons, Alexander and Nicholas.
• John Quentin Davies, Lord Davies of Stamford, politician, born 29 May 1944; died 13 January 2025