Advisory note

I mentioned on Friday that the late Lord Skidelsky and Professor Norman Stone had been members of Forest’s Advisory Council.

The Advisory Council was set up by one of my predecessors, Chris Tame. Chris joined Forest in 1988 and became director in succession to Stephen Eyres who died, aged 42, in 1990.

Chris is best known however as one of the founders of the Libertarian Alliance (LA). That was in 1977, I think, although accounts vary. In 1979 he also set up and managed the Alternative Bookshop in Covent Garden. A ‘magnet for those seeking libertarian, classical liberal and anarchist literature’, it nevertheless closed in 1986 when, ironically, market forces led to an unaffordable rent increase.

Inevitably the Alternative Bookshop had close links with the Libertarian Alliance but, such is the nature of libertarianism, I understand there were rival factions with two groups using the LA name, which is why the LA is one of the prime examples that come to mind when people ask me why Forest isn’t a membership or grassroots organisation. The problem, I reply, is that many such organisations are riven with internal politics and petty bickering, and that leads to friction, chaos, and division.

Chris joined Forest in 1988 and the Advisory Council was almost certainly his idea. The aim, I think, was to give Forest some intellectual and academic clout, if only by association because, to the best of my knowledge, Council members never met or played an active role. They were simply names on the Forest letterhead.

In truth I didn’t give it much thought when I joined Forest in 1999, but perhaps I should have. I remember, for example, giving evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Health in January 2000 when Dr Peter Brand, a GP and a Lib Dem MP on the committee, took me by surprise when he said:

I am very impressed by your letterhead which lists a Supporters Council which seems to be largely from the House of Lords and an Advisory Council with a large number of academics. I am afraid I do not recognise them all, but I can spot one or two economists and an historian or two. Do you think you might let the Committee have a list of the academic interests of the people on your Advisory Council? Before you give us the list, which you can do in writing, are there any medically qualified or life sciences qualified academics on your Advisory Council?

It was, of course, a loaded question because the answer, as I’m sure Brand knew, was ‘no’. There exists a record of my response but I won’t repeat it because it was without doubt the weakest reply I gave to any question that day. Either way, with members of the Advisory Council playing no active role, it eventually lapsed. Instead we focussed on developing a group of more media friendly ‘supporters’ such as Auberon Waugh, Antony Worrall Thompson, David Hockney, Joe Jackson, and the Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood (later Sir Ronald).

As for Chris Tame, he died of bone cancer, aged 56, in March 2006. Like Stephen Eyres, Chris was a non-smoker. I knew him, but only a little, having visited the Alternative Bookshop once or twice in the early Eighties, and our paths crossed again, very briefly, when I joined Forest and he was keen to share his thoughts and experiences.

Chris had left Forest in 1995 in somewhat opaque circumstances. According to his friend Marc Glendenning, who wrote an obituary for the Guardian, ‘In 1995, the tobacco industry, which funded Forest, removed Tame as director, believing his approach to be too confrontational and abstract’.

Whether that is true or not I honestly don’t know because I wasn’t around at the time. However more details appear in a recent essay (Chris R Tame and the long war against the enemy class) that marked the 20th anniversary of Chris’s death. If you’re interested in that period of Forest’s history, and Chris Tame’s wider legacy, do read it. In fairness, though, I should add that I have never experienced the tobacco industry interventionism that some have alleged.

See also: Chris Tame – obituary (Telegraph)

Footnote – Dr Peter Brand was MP for the Isle of Wight from 1997 to 2001. He lost his seat to the Conservatives and died, aged 76, in 2023.

PS. Remarkably, Chris Tame (pictured below) was a guest on The Wogan Show in 1989. That’s like me being invited to appear on a prime time chat show today. Imagine!