Rodney Leach Helped Change British Thinking on the European Union
June 24 2016 - 12:32PM
Dow Jones News
By James R. Hagerty
Rodney Leach, an Oxford-educated merchant banker, helped steer
Britain away from adopting the euro and then became a rare voice of
nuance in the debate on whether to remain in the European
Union.
Britons narrowly voted Thursday to quit the EU. Mr. Leach had
argued that Britain could "continue to be successful either inside
or outside the EU" and accused both sides of "adversarial
claptrap," exaggerating the consequences. Privately, he suggested
he would vote to leave.
Mr. Leach, a member of the House of Lords and director of
Jardine Matheson Holdings Ltd., died June 12 at age 82. He had
suffered a stroke in April while presiding over a debate on the EU
referendum.
"He was instrumental in changing our relationship with the EU,"
said Martin Jacomb, a former chairman of the British life insurer
Prudential PLC.
Mr. Leach delved into the minutiae of European treaties at the
urging of his second wife, Jessica Douglas-Home, the widow of
Charles Douglas-Home, who was editor of the Times of London. Mr.
Leach concluded that the EU was usurping democratic control in its
member states and that the unified currency wouldn't work. "The
Italians will want to borrow Italian amounts of money at German
interest rates," he said at a debate in 1999.
Mr. Leach was chairman of a group called Business for Sterling
that campaigned against British adoption of the euro. Eventually,
the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Tony Blair backed away
from that idea.
Mr. Leach wasn't reflexively against close cooperation with
Europe but sought more of a neighborly alliance rather than what he
termed a "bureaucratic oligarchy." In 2005, he set up Open Europe,
a think tank that studies EU issues. The organization's moderate
findings were cited by people on both sides of the recent debate on
whether to quit the union.
"He had read the European treaties," said Tara Douglas-Home, a
stepson. "He knew the details." Mr. Douglas-Home said his
stepfather was effective partly because of his rare ability to
distill complex matters into clear language.
Mr. Leach struggled with the question of how to vote in the
referendum, family members said, but finally confided an
inclination to leave the EU. "We aren't ever going to sacrifice our
democracy, and the EU cannot ever develop a democracy," he wrote in
an email leaked to the British press. "So it has to be exit,
painful though that may temporarily be."
Charles Guy Rodney Leach was born on June 1, 1934, in Dublin. At
Balliol College in Oxford, he won composition prizes in Greek and
Latin. During the Hungarian uprising of 1956, he organized a relief
fund for refugees. After giving up a budding career as an Oxford
don, he crossed the Atlantic to work for Greenshields Inc., an
investment firm in Montreal.
Returning to London, he joined the merchant bank N.M. Rothschild
& Sons and later worked for the Swiss banking empire headed by
Edmond Safra, a billionaire financier born in Lebanon.
Jardine Matheson, an Asian conglomerate founded in 1832 by the
Keswick family of Scotland, recruited him in the early 1980s. He
gradually assumed a major role in strategy for Jardine, whose
holdings include real estate, retailing and the Mandarin Oriental
hotels. Mr. Leach helped devise measures to protect Jardine from
takeovers and move its legal domicile to Bermuda from Hong
Kong.
When debates over Europe called him away from Jardine's London
offices, he sometimes quipped to colleagues, "I'm off to save the
nation," according to the Times of London.
He found time to write a 286-book, "Europe: A Concise
Encyclopedia of the European Union."
In 2006, Mr. Leach was appointed a life peer and, as Lord Leach
of Fairford, joined the House of Lords.
He enjoyed walking in his London neighborhood of Holland Park
and in the countryside. His other interests included bridge, chess
and tennis. He and his wife sometimes played doubles with the
historian Antonia Fraser and the playwright Harold Pinter.
Mr. Leach's marriage to his first wife, Felicity Ballantyne,
ended in divorce. His survivors include their five children, his
second wife and two stepsons.
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 24, 2016 12:17 ET (16:17 GMT)
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