Journalist who had a meteoric rise up the political ladder to become a minister in the government of Harold WilsonThe former
Labour defence minister Lord Chalfont, who has died aged 100, had perhaps the most precipitous and unlikely rise to a political career in modern history. He was Alun Gwynne Jones, defence correspondent of the Times, at the time of the
election of Harold Wilson’s first Labour government in October 1964, and in a matter of days was summoned for an unexpected briefing with the prime minister at No 10, leaving a short time later as both a minister – for disarmament, based in the Foreign Office, not the Ministry of Defence – and a life peer.
“If the word had been invented I would have said I was gobsmacked,” Chalfont told the Independent in 1995. “I have never expressed any political views that could characterise me as left or right.” In that, over time, he advised all three main parties on defence issues, he was correct. Many, however, would query that assessment, as he later took increasingly authoritarian stands in support of the Thatcher government, which led to her recommending his appointment in 1989 as deputy chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority and in 1990 as chairman of the Radio Authority.