George Gardiner (politician)

Sir George Arthur Gardiner (3 March 1935 – 16 November 2002) was a British Conservative Party politician and journalist who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Reigate from 1974 to 1997.

As an only child (though he would gain two half-brothers from his father's second marriage), from this point he was raised by his mother as a single parent who worked in a butcher's shop and lived in a cheaply rented home.

[2] He was educated at The Harvey Grammar School in Folkestone and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) and gained a first-class honours degree in 1958.

During an election for the post of president of the association, he printed scores of forged ballot papers for a postal vote backing his own candidacy.

He stood unsuccessfully as Conservative candidate for Coventry South at the 1970 general election, in which he distanced himself from the anti-immigration rhetoric of Enoch Powell and built a close relationship with the local Sikh community.

[2] Like Powell, in later life Gardiner was well known for his vehemently Eurosceptic views, but earlier he had supported Britain's entry into the European Community (EC).

Although a right-wing Conservative, Gardiner was a Heath loyalist after the 1972 economic U-turn to combat rising unemployment, which produced the Barber Boom by injecting more spending yet cutting taxes.

However, despite his long, enthusiastic and loyal support, Thatcher never offered Gardiner a ministerial or front bench position during her years as party leader or as Prime Minister.

He was on the editorial board that prepared the Club's October 1985 Conservative Party Conference issue of their newspaper, Right Ahead and contributed an article: 'Why Margaret – Still?'

Gardiner continued writing for the Club, and in the October 1989 edition of Right Ahead, he contributed the leading front-page article entitled 'Murders that should lie on the conscience of MPs', calling for the return of capital punishment.

When in November 1990, Margaret Thatcher was on the verge of resignation, Gardiner led a last gasp deputation of loyal MPs to Number 10 to try to persuade her to fight on.

Attempting to preserve the party's Thatcherite philosophy undiluted, Gardiner was instrumental in setting up the Conservative Way Forward group, with the express aim of providing a focal point for supporting those seen as ideologically sympathetic to Thatcherism in the government: including Michael Portillo and John Redwood.

He had survived a deselection attempt on 28 June 1996, but an article six months later in the Sunday Express, where he compared Major to a ventriloquist's dummy for the government's pro-European Chancellor Kenneth Clarke proved to be the last straw for his constituency party, and Gardiner was deselected as Conservative candidate for the next general election, by 291 votes to 226 votes, on 30 January 1997.

Gardiner died at St George's Nursing Home, Westminster, on 16 November 2002, aged 67, of polycystic kidney disease and chronic renal failure.