Dick Leonard remembered

THE BRITISHMPEEC correspondents in Brussels in the two decades after Britain joined the European club were a talented lot. Two went on to edit , and one became editor of the . Another wrote entertaining fiction for the and went on to be Britain’s current prime minister. Dick Leonard, neither a Eurosceptic nor destined to occupy Downing Street but “a true gentleman journalist”, as that editor affectionately calls him, went on instead to write numerous books about every British prime minister from Walpole onwards.Not that Dick lacked political ambitions of his own. He was the youngest candidate in Britain’s 1955 general election and an adviser to Tony Crosland, a Labour foreign secretary and influential intellectual of the party’s social-democratic wing. In 1970 Dick became the Labour for Romford, but the constituency’s boundaries soon changed, ending his career in Parliament prematurely. Breaking ranks with the party in 1971 to vote in favour of Britain joining the European Economic Community (the , as it then was) in effect ruled him out as a candidate for another seat. At the time it was Labour, not the Tories, who found Europe toxic.