Sir Leslie Frederick Murphy (17 November 1915 – 29 September 2007) was a British businessman who became chairman of the National Enterprise Board.
Murphy was educated at Southall Grammar School and Birkbeck College, London,[1] where he graduated with a first-class degree in Mathematics.
[3] He went on to be Chairman of the National Enterprise Board in 1977 but resigned with his entire board when Sir Keith Joseph (the new industry minister) decided to remove its responsibility for the government's holding in Rolls-Royce in 1979.
A Labour sympathiser, he was employed as Private Secretary to Hugh Gaitskell at the Ministry of Fuel and Power during the late 1940s.
[2] However, in 1981 he was one of the 100 advertised signatories to the Limehouse Declaration, the founding statement of the newly-established Social Democratic Party (SDP).