Clement-Jones family 12/22 - Person Sheet
Clement-Jones family 12/22 - Person Sheet
NameAnnabel Terese (Tessa) FRASER , 277
Birth15 Oct 1942, London
Death13th September 2022
MotherRosamond DELVES BROUGHTON , 265 (1917-2012)
Spouses
Birth19 Jul 1937, Edinburgh
Death2013
Marriage15 Sep 1964
Divorce1978
ChildrenAeneas Simon , 328 (1965-)
 Laura Elizabeth , 329 (1966-)
 Edward Andrew , 449 (1974-)
Birth29 Sep 1938, Shanghai
Marriage1985
Notes for Annabel Terese (Tessa) FRASER
Special Adviser to Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP whilst Secretary of State for Health, then Education and Chancellor of the Exchequer 1989-1995. Director of the Centre for Policy Studies 1995-2004 now Vice Chairman.


What does she think?
Independent, The (London)Sep 10, 1995  
ON THE face of it, her appointment begs a serious question. Why give the job of executive director of the Conservatives' most cerebral think-tank to a candidate who didn't go to university and has one thin pamphlet to her credit?
Tessa Keswick, named last week as the executive director of the Centre for Policy Studies, has stunned the brainy right of the Tory party. Her coup in being appointed intellectual heir to Sir Keith Joseph was unexpected, particularly since she had only recently given up the post of political adviser to Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, the long-standing "wet" bete noire of Conservative hardliners.

What is she bringing to the party? Her backers want the CPS, Baroness Thatcher's ideological offspring, to regain its leading and guiding role in the development of Conservative political thinking. Most of all, they want to see its ideas reflected in John Major's manifesto for the general election. It is a tall order. In that most rigorous of free markets - for radical concepts to satisfy Tory appetites - the competition is fierce. And the punishment for failure is oblivion.
Lord Griffiths of Forest Ffach, who headed the Downing Street policy unit and now chairs the CPS, was instrumental in giving Mrs Keswick the job. Naturally, he defends his board's choice. "She is a very able person," he insists. "She is full of ideas. She has had a lot of experience behind the scenes in developing policy. She is very articulate on paper. I just think she is very competent."
He has known her "for ages", but is hard pressed to remember why. "I think I read pieces by her in the Spectator and the Telegraph and so on."

Others on the Tory right are less charitable. They exhibit, or feign well, surprise that the standard bearer of the party's most influential think-tank should now be a ministerial fixer whose one pamphlet was written in the early Seventies on the not-so-burning issue of childcare. "It is an amazing choice," said one hard-hat thinker. "The CPS is the ideological nerve centre of the Thatcher revolution. It seems rather odd to entrust it to Clarke's closest confidante."

Mrs Keswick takes over on 1 October, a week before the Tory party conference in Blackpool that will start the countdown to the election. In 18 months, at most, she must revive the flagging fortunes of the Centre for Policy Studies just when the radical right is showing signs of the fissiparous tendencies usually associated with the barmy left. John Redwood, latter- day Keith Joseph and unsuccessful candidate for the party leadership, has started up his own think-tank. The Adam Smith Institute is braying on all cylinders and the Institute for Economic Affairs is pushing its agenda.

Into this cut-throat marketplace of ideas steps a daughter of the Scottish aristocracy who cheerfully admits that she only became political in her early thirties, when striking miners turned off the lights in her home.

THE Honourable Annabel Therese Fraser, daughter of war hero Lord Lovat, was born in 1942, and educated bilingually by a French governess and at convent schools in London, Paris and Madrid. Her mother was the only daughter of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, who was acquitted in a famous pre-war trial in Nairobi of the murder of Lord Erroll, his wife's lover. The scandal, celebrated in the film White Mischief, was hushed up at home. "It was never discussed in our family when I was young," she recalled later. "We all thought he was innocent." Unwished-for drama has dogged the family since. Two years ago, her brother Lord Lovat was killed by a buffalo during an African safari, and months later her brother Simon died after falling off his horse while drag hunting.

At 15, Therese gained an A-level in French, and two years later another in English literature, but she declined to try for university because she wanted to see the world. She did various jobs in swinging Sixties London, including selling adverts for the Spectator. In 1964, she married Lord Reay, head of the Clan Mackay. They had three children, but the marriage did not work out and was dissolved in 1978.

The shock of separation brought out her individuality. Living in the capital as a single parent forced the society belle to look for work, and she is intensely proud of having made her way in the tough-nosed world of finance. She worked first as London editor of an American oil magazine. Then, using her contacts, she introduced City money to Algy Cluff, when he was forming a North Sea oil consortium. Her reward was a shareholding "for which I didn't pay. Luckily they struck oil the first time!" In the Eighties, she worked for Cluff Investments as trading executive in the emergent market in China.

Politics had already found her in Notting Hill Gate. The pit strike in 1974 and its attendant social dislocation infuriated the single mum trying to cook by candlelight. That year, when Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher founded the CPS to destroy the "corporatism" of the Heath era, she became active in the Tory party, winning election to Kensington council. She might have stayed there had not a pamphlet on childcare and women in the labour market attracted the attention of right-thinking Conservatives.In 1985 she married Henry Keswick, one of Britain's richest men, whose massive fortune is based in trading interests in Hong Kong. She "beavered away" in the background for a decade, standing for a hopeless Scottish seat in the 1987 general election, until her big chance came in 1989. In January that year, she joined Kenneth Clarke as his political adviser at the Department of Health. They made an odd couple: she, the aristocrat's daughter with unrivalled City connections; he, the blokish, beer-and-cheroots football fan who would eventually run the country's finances. It was said that when Clarke's outgoing political adviser rang the Keswick household to tell her she had got the job, the call was taken by the butler. But she opened social doors for the future Chancellor, and kept a lifeline open to the Tory right which is her natural political home. "She has been Clarke's right-wing conscience," said a fellow free-marketeer.

As Clarke's biographer Andy McSmith points out, her relationship with her Secretary of State was "obviously close". She moved with him to Education, the Home Office, and then to the Treasury. "By 1994, accusing fingers were pointed at her, holding her responsible for what were perceived to be Clarke's mistakes," said McSmith. Then, in February this year, Mrs Keswick mysteriously quit. She said at the time: "It is a wrench, but after six fascinating years, it is time to move on."

And that was that, until her equally dramatic reappearance last week. The CPS said Tessa Keswick would be its executive director from 1 October. It was a very private coup. The outgoing director, Gerald Frost, is bound by a confidentiality clause that stops him talking about his departure, but it is no secret in Westminster that the Centre, once the intellectual power-house of the Tory party with an input to government policy, had slipped sharply in the influence league. The torrent of ideas had diminished, and financial support was proving harder to come by.

What more natural than to turn to a former government insider with a brilliant record of introducing money to a good home? Tessa Keswick will have little difficulty in finding the wherewithal to revive the flagging financial fortunes of the CPS. But some doubt whether she has the originality of mind required to bring forward the next generation of Tory thinking. A veteran lobby correspondent says cruelly: "She's never had an idea in her life." Her few on-the-record interviews have not been noticeable for deep policy thinking, though that would be understandable for a political adviser who is not supposed to court the limelight. She is not above repeating glib generalisations, such as "territorial disputes are always a political nightmare". A faintly-surprised egghead at a rival think-tank observed: "She will be good at talking to ministers. The question marks are on the intellectual front. We are not talking David Willetts {the formidably bright ex-CPS director, now an MP here."

But political inventiveness will not be the yardstick by which her time at CPS will be judged. Having worked in four departments of state, she has been on the inside track at a critical time, and must know the general direction of policy within the key areas of the economy, education, health and law and order. It will be her role to mobilise other, perhaps better, minds to offer radical solutions.
She will be helped greatly by her natural vivacity. Admirers talk of a power-charmer with a "sparkling, stylish, sexy manner", who is "terribly good fun". She is 52, though she does not look anything like it. But when the Times visited the Home Office to photograph Clarke's all-female private office, she scolded the reporter who asked her age. Her dress is undemonstrative. "She tends to dress very elegantly, but in drab colours," said a woman friend. "She's very good at getting people together to talk about things. She has an 'in' to some very high-powered businessmen who do not feature in the political scene but who are 'interested'."

Civil servants who have worked with Mrs Keswick tend to support the ungallant version of her policy grasp. But they do credit her with popularising the phrase "middle England". How ironic, if aristocratic Scotland should deliver this political terrain back to the Tories.
Copyright 1995 Newspaper Publishing PLC

Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

Lady Keswick obituary
Redoubtable special adviser to Kenneth Clarke who entered politics after a power cut and led the Centre for Policy Studies

Thursday September 15 2022, 12.01am, The Times

Economy
Obituaries




Aristocratic, extremely rich and on the right of the Conservative Party, Lady Keswick was described as the unlikeliest special adviser to Kenneth Clarke. Yet she remained with the jazz-loving, suede-shoes-wearing “man of the people” for six years as he rose to increasingly important cabinet posts at Health, Education, the Home Office and the Treasury.

When contacted to be offered the role of his special adviser at the Department of Health in 1988 the phone was answered by her butler but she was soon fighting with Clarke in the trenches as they tried to persuade officials and doctors to accept an internal market in health — a two-year period she compared to “the battles of the Somme”.

At Education (1990-92) and the Home Office (1992-93) she strongly backed Clarke’s robust stance in standing up to the teaching unions and the police, while at the same time helping to “keep temperatures down”. Yet there were differences on some issues between Clarke, seen as a rising figure on the centre-left, and Keswick, who was described by a friend as “Clarke’s right-wing conscience”.
The daughter of a war hero who was a former Tory councillor in Kensington and married to one of Britain’s richest men, Keswick was well connected within the Conservative Party and in the media. As such she revelled in her role of ensuring that Clarke presented policies with what she called in her cut-glass accent “bom-pom-pom”. And although she soon gave up trying to make him look a little less scruffy because it was “obviously pointless”, she drew the line at him announcing the liberalisation of licensing laws while brandishing a cheroot and a pint, despite his plea that “I can’t see wrong anything with it”.

In 1993 she moved with Clarke to the Treasury, after the UK’s withdrawal from the ERM and the sacking of the chancellor Norman Lamont. Her doubts about a single currency did not sway the chancellor, who strongly favoured joining the euro. Aware of unhappiness in John Major’s No 10 about Clarke’s pro-EU declarations, she regularly tried but failed to get him to moderate his remarks. Nonetheless, her influence on his budgets was said to be considerable. Described as “feisty” in the days when women with strong and strident opinions earned the moniker as a matter of course, she was said to “give as good as she gets” in their debates. Profiles also noted that she was charming and slightly flirtatious with a roaring laugh, belying her more demure exterior, with a taste for restrained designer clothes and carefully styled dark hair, regularly coiffured at the Savoy.

In his memoir Clarke described Keswick as “a highly intelligent aristocratic Scot who became a key political aide battling alongside me”. She responded with typical candour: “It is personally wounding that after more than six years of slave labour for him that he cannot say anything nicer than that I am an aristocrat and ‘right-wing’, clearly both insults in his book.” Yet their mutual respect was deep. In an interview with the Evening Standard in 1993 she described Clarke as “astute, able, robust but always prepared to listen and tremendously active” and “on money matters he could not be more Thatcherite”. Clarke was said to be devastated when she resigned as his special adviser in 1995.


Soon afterwards she became director of the Conservative Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). The think tank had been established by Sir Keith Joseph in 1974 to promote free market ideas after the corporatist policies of the government of Ted Heath from 1970 to 1974.
Her appointment was met with misogynistic scorn by some in the party, who viewed her as insufficiently right-wing and complained that she lacked the erudition to hold a senior post at the think tank that had laid the ideological foundations for Thatcherism. One unnamed critic told a journalist that “she’s just a jolly girl who watched Clarke’s back”. Not for the first time, she was underestimated.
Little did the critics know the forceful and eloquent way she rewrote some officials’ papers to better represent Clarke’s views. Her time in Whitehall had made her sensitive to ministers’ need for practical policies as well as radical ideas. As director she emerged as an authoritative yet emollient figure, who managed to largely avoid controversy, generated more than 100 policy pamphlets and restored its finances. In 2004 she was rewarded with the appointment of deputy chairwoman, holding the post until 2017. The CPS chairman, Lord Saatchi, admired and learnt from her political and managerial skills. He admitted: “She changed my life.”

Annabel Thérèse (known as Tessa) Fraser was born in 1942, the third of six children to Simon “Shimi” Fraser, Master of Lovat and 15th Lord Lovat, and Rosamond Delves Broughton. Her father was a decorated D-Day war hero and the exploits of his company of commandos were celebrated in the film The Longest Day (1962), in which he was played by Peter Lawford. Her maternal grandfather was tried and acquitted in Nairobi for the murder of his wife’s lover, Lord Erroll, in 1941, a scandal dramatised in the film White Mischief.

She was brought up at Beaufort Castle in Inverness-shire, the ancestral family home. Miserable at the independent Catholic Sacred Heart Convent School in Woldingham, Surrey, she left at 15 having already passed A-levels in French and English literature. Adventurous, energetic and confident, she decided to travel. She ended up in London selling adverts for The Spectator and in 1964, aged 21, she married Hugh Mackay, 14th Lord Reay. They had three children: Aeneas is 15th Lord Reay and a corporate financier, Laura is a psychotherapist, and Edward a pilot.

By 1973 she was separated from her husband and living in Notting Hill with her children. With Britain in the grip of a three-day week and power cuts, Keswick recalled the lights flickering on and off and not having a working cooker to make dinner for her children. At her wits’ end, she described the moment as a political awakening. Her marriage was dissolved in 1978, strengthening her resolve to make her own way.

She edited the oil magazine B&E International and in the 1980s worked for Cluff Investments. She became a director and a trading executive in China, which she first visited in 1982 for Cluff.

Naturally sociable, she made friends easily and was an avid reader on politics. Her uncle Sir Hugh Fraser was a Conservative MP and first husband of Lady Antonia Fraser. Another uncle was Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a diplomat and Tory MP who was sent as Churchill’s special envoy to the Yugoslav leader Tito in 1943. She began to think she could make a mark in Conservative politics and was elected as a Conservative councillor in Kensington from 1982 to 1986. In the 1987 general election she stood for the party in what might be regarded as her home seat of Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber. Her party might have won a landslide victory nationally but she was overtaken by the Labour candidate for second place behind the sitting Liberal MP Russell Johnston. The loss ended her hopes to become an MP but not her political ambitions.


Two years earlier she had married her second husband Henry (later Sir Henry) Keswick, a second cousin who had loved her since they had mixed when they were young. “Henry had been waiting,” said one who knew both. He was chairman of Jardine Matheson, which had built its fortune trading in Hong Kong. The private family wealth was reckoned to exceed £6 billion. Attendance at the Keswicks’ weekend parties and soirées was eagerly sought. She and her husband brought together friends from the arts, literature, business and politics. They had large estates in Scotland and Wiltshire but their London base was in Smith Square, a stone’s throw from Conservative Party headquarters. She is survived by her husband and the three children from her first marriage.


In 2014 she was appointed chancellor of the University of Buckingham, Britain’s first independent university. Buckingham was well connected with leading figures in the Conservative Party and previous chancellors included Baroness Thatcher and Lord Hailsham. She supported the university’s ideals and handled internal diplomatic issues with skill. She was the second most generous donor in the university’s history and her connections in the corporate world helped to raise further funds. In 2020 she retired, beset by worsening health.

Keswick remained a passionate sinophile and her marriage gave her access to many leading figures in China after its reopening under Deng Xiaoping. She studied its history and culture and travelled widely after 1997, at one point living with a Chinese family to learn Mandarin. In 2020 she published her well-received book on China, The Colour of the Sky After Rain. She told The Times that when she first visited the country in 1982 to scout out business opportunities, everyone was “wearing cloth caps” and were hunched in disinterest. “They were all complete communists and everything was dark and miserable.” Today, she said, “they are natural capitalists and love being rich. The big cars, the big buildings — you see it all now in the Chinese cities.”

Above all, she urged British commentators and policymakers to humour the Red Dragon and acquire a greater understanding of the Chinese.

Lady Keswick, Conservative policy adviser, was born on October 15, 1942. She died of ovarian cancer on September 13, 2022, aged 79

Tessa Keswick, political adviser to Ken Clarke, director of the Centre for Policy Studies and Sinophile – obituary
She grew to love China and its people partly through her husband, Henry Keswick, taipan of the Far Eastern trading house Jardine Matheson
By
Telegraph Obituaries
14 September 2022 • 9:46pm


Tessa Keswick, who has died aged 79, was a well-known Society figure who surprised those who did not know her – and even some who did – by emerging in middle age as a far-from-grey eminence in the Conservative Party.
She straddled both sides of the party in its bitter ideological struggles. Her first appointment was as political adviser to Kenneth Clarke, Chancellor of the Exchequer in John Major’s government, something of a “wet” and an arch-Europhile.
But then, having served with this bête noire of the Tory Right, in 1995 she became director of the Centre for Policy Studies. This was the intellectual centre of the dry, free-marketing Right of the party, where the Thatcherite revolution had been given some of its theoretical sustenance.

Even then she was not easily branded in terms of wet and dry, Left and Right. She disapproved in theory of “perverse incentive”, as in: “If you pay single mothers benefit, why would they marry and relieve the state?”

And yet she was not heartless on this subject. For some difficult years, she had lived alone bringing up a family in far from ideal circumstances, and this experience of “lone motherhood” gave her some sympathy with others in the same condition.

She was also disdainful of what she thought the Tory Party’s traditional misogyny. She herself had struggled with the party machine. The turmoil of 1973-74 having excited her interest in politics, she became a Conservative member of Kensington council and wrote a pamphlet on childcare.

But after she was allowed to fight a hopeless seat in the 1987 general election, she was not selected in 1992. After the 1997 Labour landslide she was dismayed that there were only 13 Tory women MPs, no more than in 1931. And she was contemptuous of those Tories who sneered at the 101 Labour women MPs as “Blair’s babes” or “quota women”.

“I can’t believe that I hear this argument,” she said. “It’s a typically sexist observation that just because there are 100 Labour women they’re somehow no good.” These sentiments came from an unlikely source.

Annabel Thérèse Fraser was born on October 15 1942, the daughter of the 17th Lord Lovat, and into a family whose story was romantic but melancholy. The Frasers were Catholic highland chieftains who had once owned 250,000 acres, as well as their seat at Beaufort Castle in Inverness-shire.
An earlier Lord Lovat and MacShimidh – the clan’s name for its chief – took part in the 1745 rebellion and was beheaded after its failure. The peerage was attainted, but revived in the next century.

Tessa’s father was a famous soldier, a DSO and MC who led his commandos ashore on D-Day. He had married Rosalind, the only daughter of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, notorious as the acquitted defendant in the “White Mischief” murder trial in wartime Kenya. Tessa later said that the case was “never discussed in our family when I was young”, but that: “We all thought he was innocent.”
Politics was in the blood: “Shimi” Lovat was briefly a junior minister, his brother was Sir Hugh Fraser MP, and one of his sisters married Sir Fitzroy Maclean MP. But for all its social and political glamour, the family had many sorrows to come.

An old-fashioned education under a French governess, and at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Woldingham and other convent schools in London, Paris and Madrid, left Tessa with fluent French though few formal qualifications. She briefly worked as a trainee at J Walter Thompson, but for a girl of her class the immediate goal was marriage.

In 1964 she married another Highland chieftain, Lord Reay, head of the Mackay clan. They had three children, but the marriage did not prosper. As she later said, it was a mismatch between lowland Protestant and highland Catholic – “and they’ve been fighting for hundreds of years”. The marriage was dissolved in 1978.

She thus found herself alone with two young sons and a daughter, and looked for work. For a time she worked for an American oil magazine, then as a financial scout for the entrepreneur Algy Cluff when he was forming a consortium to exploit North Sea oil. Her payment was in stock, and “luckily they struck oil the first time.”

In the 1960s Tessa had briefly worked selling advertising for The Spectator. She became part of the magazine’s larger family again after 1975 when it was bought by the “taipan” Henry Keswick, scion of the Jardine dynasty whose fortune stemmed from Hong Kong, and an old friend of hers.

Friendship ripened, and in 1985 she and Keswick married. They soon became notable for their hospitality at their houses in Westminster and Wiltshire, where Tessa Keswick established the nearest thing to a political salon seen in England for years.

She was a member of Kensington Council from 1982 to 1986, and sat on its housing and special services committees, as well as serving as a governor of two local schools. At the 1987 general election she stood quixotically for Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber, her own “airt” but unwinnable for a Tory.

Then in 1989 she joined Ken Clarke, Health Secretary at the time, as special adviser. It seemed an unlikely choice, with both political and social dissonance between aristocratic High Tory and blokey, beer-drinking Europhile. Disparaging voices questioned her aptitudes for this high-powered job. She was indeed more of a operator than an ideologue, but maybe for that reason it was a surprisingly successful partnership.

As she said: “We were very, very close and we were good fun together. He is a very, very funny man.” Nevertheless, in 1995 she abruptly left Clarke’s office, and, later in the year, became director of the Centre for Policy Studies.

In the 1990s Tessa Keswick’s family knew many sorrows. Her father died in great old age, but not before her brothers Andrew Fraser and Simon, Master of Lovat, had both predeceased him, one attacked by a buffalo on African safari, the other succumbing to a heart attack while hunting. The family fortune dwindled, and Beaufort had to be sold.

But Tessa Keswick had the consolations of her own domestic life and her work as one of the Right’s less probable but more popular muses.

In 2013 she became a director of Daily Mail and General Trust, and was elected chancellor of the University of Buckingham, a post she held until 2020. That year, she published The Colour of the Sky After Rain, a memoir of the Chinese people and culture she grew to love during 40 years of travelling in the region.

Lady Keswick is survived by her husband Sir Henry (he was knighted in 2009) and by a daughter and two sons from her first marriage.
Tessa Keswick, born October 15 1942, died September 13 2022
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