Lord Moyne är död

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2026/11/02/3rd-lord-moyne-right-wing-guinness-mitford-died-obituary/

The 3rd Lord Moyne, Jonathan Guinness, who has died aged 96, served on the board of his family brewing company for 27 years, but he was less well-known for his business acumen than for his vigorous Right-wing views and colourful personal life.

The Guinnesses had emerged from Co Kildare in the 18th century and, by virtue of brewing their invigorating stout in Dublin, had amassed vast wealth and married into illustrious families. Yet they were plagued by recurrent bouts of bad fortune and defined by a streak of loucheness and eccentricity which found full and flamboyant expression in Jonathan Guinness.

Jonathan’s parents, Diana Mitford and Bryan Guinness, had been the toast of literary London in the early 1930s, but the marriage ended when Diana fell in love with, and eventually married, Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader. Young Jonathan inherited his stepfather’s talent for provoking outrage: in 1973, when standing as Conservative candidate in the Lincoln by election, he called for the return of the death penalty, with beheading being his preferred form of execution (for “humanitarian” reasons). As a DIY alternative, he suggested that razor blades should be left in the cells of convicted murderers, a proposal that earned him the nickname “Old Razor Blades”.

In 1977, while he was vice-chairman of the Right-wing Monday Club, he invited a former SS colonel to stay in his home shortly before the man was kicked out of the country by the Home Office.

With his unruly grey hair and well-cut suits, Guinness was once described as looking like a cross between a time lord and an 18th-century dandy, and his somewhat raffish charm made him fascinating to women. Though he described himself as having been married “only twice”, he became best known for his polygamous liaison with Susan “Shoe” Taylor, a statuesque butcher’s daughter and free spirit whom he had met in 1978 when she turned up at a St Sebastian’s Day party at his house in the Costa Brava village of Cadaqués, northern Spain.

Shoe had left England in the 1960s to see the world, inspired, curiously enough, by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Before they met, she had ridden a hermaphrodite circus elephant in the Lebanon, performed topless as “the strongest woman in the world”, done time in jail for drugs and been gang-raped in Morocco, a trauma that had caused her to become bulimic.

By 1978, Shoe was living in a stone-age hut in the Pyrenees, attempting to eke out a living by selling lavender, performing as a tumbler or offering her services as a masseuse. Guinness immediately realised they had something in common when she told him she had done time in Holloway. “I said, ‘How interesting, my mother was a political prisoner there during the war’,” he recalled. He sent her a copy of his mother’s autobiography and they began a correspondence.

Although Shoe had lost all her teeth as a result of constant vomiting, they began an affair, and she bore him three children and taught him yoga. She eventually moved to Cornwall as his mistress and he paid for her upkeep and that of their children, while remaining married to Suzanne, his second wife. The arrangement seemed acceptable to both women: “I love them both,” Guinness explained.

Shoe’s affair with the Guinness heir was a society rumour for years before Guinness published her biography, Shoe: an Odyssey of a Sixties Survivor, in 1989. Written in the form of an ersatz autobiography, Guinness claimed that it was intended to forestall a tabloid smear, but the book only fuelled his reputation as an oddball. Worse, it made him seem a bit of a chump, when he would much have preferred to have been considered immoral. “Evil is glamorous isn’t it?” he told an interviewer. “The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, after all. I’d rather be regarded as being wrong than stupid.”

Jonathan Bryan Guinness was born on March 16 1930, the eldest son of Bryan Guinness, a gentleman poet and novelist, and his first wife, the former Diana Mitford. The first Lord Moyne, Jonathan’s grandfather Walter Guinness, was the youngest son of the first Earl of Iveagh. A Tory MP for many years, he was created Lord Moyne in 1932, but was assassinated in 1944 by the Stern Gang while serving as British minister in Cairo.

After his parents’ divorce in 1934, young Jonathan led a peripatetic existence divided between his father’s home in Ireland and that of his mother and her new husband in England. He adored his mother, but when he was 10 she was imprisoned for her fascist beliefs, and he was so indignant at her treatment that he secretly hoped the Allies would lose the war. When they did not, he graduated from being a fascist sympathiser to a believer in what he described as “a Machiavellian form of Conservatism”. In 1984, with his sister Catherine Guinness, he would write The House of Mitford, an acclaimed account of his mother’s extraordinary family.

After Eton and Oxford, where he read modern languages, Guinness worked for Reuters for three years as a reporter in Bonn, but decided that the City offered better prospects. After training at the merchant bank Erlangers, he joined Philip Hill and then became a director of Leopold Joseph. He was a director of Arthur Guinness, the family firm, from 1961 to 1988.

But politics was his real passion. He served as a Tory member of Leicestershire County Council from 1970 to 1974 and became a leading light in the Monday Club, serving as the club’s chairman from 1972 to 1974. Regarded as a moderate in Monday Club terms, he was pro-European, supported the Heath government’s prices and incomes policies and opposed compulsory repatriation of immigrants, a stance which embroiled him in bitter rows with some of the more extreme Right-wing members of the club.

Yet he remained unashamedly racist: even in the late 1980s, before he was ousted as vice chairman by the MP John Carlisle, he was active in the Monday Club’s attempts to persuade Mrs Thatcher to introduce a voluntary repatriation scheme; one meeting on the fringe of a Tory party conference was advertised with fly-poster images of immigrants being emptied from a dustbin into Britain.

Guinness’s eccentric behaviour during the Lincoln by-election, which he lost to the independent Labour candidate Dick Taverne, cost him the chance of a career in the Commons. He was in Parliament as a member of the House of Lords from the death of his father in 1992 until 1999, when he was kicked out as part of the Labour government’s reform of the Lords. But by this time, he had become entangled in a succession of business scandals.

It was his cousin, the 3rd Earl of Iveagh, who, as chairman of Guinness, recruited Ernest Saunders to be chief executive in 1981. Eventually, Saunders spent nine months in jail for his part in an illegal scheme to boost Guinness’s share price and enhance its position in a takeover bid.

Jonathan Guinness’s relationship with Saunders was one of the enduring peculiarities of the whole episode. In 1987 he was the first board member to call publicly for Saunders’s dismissal. But in 1991 he argued that enough was enough and it was time to let Saunders out of prison. In 1997 he wrote a book about the affair which won favourable reviews.

But the same year he became involved in another business scandal, after he paid £17 million to buy a controlling stake in Trustor, a Swedish investment company quoted on the Stockholm Bourse. Soon after the deal was done, an estimated £47 million disappeared from the company’s bank accounts.

Investigators found that some of the money had ended up in the Gibraltar bank account of Intercom, a London-based public relations firm of which Moyne was a director. The company shared an office address with Access to Justice, a company wound up by the DTI earlier that year after trading while insolvent, of which Moyne was also a director.

Moyne protested his innocence, claiming to have been duped by his business associates, and in 2001 he was cleared on charges of embezzlement in a Swedish court. But by this time, on account of his involvement with Access for Justice, he had been banned from being a company director and declared bankrupt with debts of £40 million. Subsequently, he and Shoe were reported to be making ends meet by selling magnetised wristbands as a treatment for arthritis.

Moyne married Ingrid Wyndham, in 1951; they had a daughter and two sons, one of whom predeceased him. They divorced in 1962 and she later married his cousin, the Tory politician Paul Channon. In 1964 he married Suzanne Phillips, known as Sue, with whom he had a daughter and son. With Shoe Taylor, who died in 2003, he had a further two daughters and a son.

His son, Valentine Guinness, who was born in 1959, succeeds to the peerage.

Lord Moyne, born March 16 1930, died October 30 2026