Philip Goodhart

Sir Philip Carter Goodhart (born 3 November 1925) is a British Conservative politician, the son of Arthur Lehman Goodhart.

Goodhart attended The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. He contested Consett in 1950 whilst still a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was elected Member of Parliament for Beckenham at a 1957 by-election, and served until his retirement in 1992. One of the unsuccessful candidates for the nomination in 1957 was the young Margaret Thatcher.

In his book Referendum (Tom Stacey Ltd, 1971) he argued that the referendum, then under discussion in the context of the UK joining the EEC, could in fact serve to entrench constitutional safeguards that the UK then - as now - lacked, quoting Arthur Balfour's contribution to the debate on the Parliament Bill (later the Parliament Act 1911): "In the referendum lies our hope of getting the sort of constitutional security which every other country but our own enjoys ..." (Referendum, p 205). He wrote the definitive account of the referendum campaign in 1975, Full-hearted Consent, and also The 1922: The Story of the 1922 Committee (with Ursula Branston; Macmillan, 1973). He was a junior Northern Ireland minister (1979–1981) and a junior Defence minister (1981). He was a member of the Founding Council of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.

His wife is named Val, and they have seven children together and until recently lived in Whitebarn, Youlbury Woods. One of his children is David Goodhart, director of the Demos thinktank and journalist for the Prospect magazine.

References

• The Times Guide to the House of Commons, Times Newspapers Ltd, 1987
• Leigh Rayment's Historical List of MPs
• Flade, Roland. The Lehmans: From Rimpar to the New World: A Family History, 2nd Enlarged Ed., 1999
• http://.rai.ox.ac.uk/about/history/foundingcouncil

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Philip Goodhart