Alistair McAlpine, Baron McAlpine of West Green

McAlpine was born at The Dorchester in Mayfair, London. His great-grandfather was "Concrete Bob", Robert McAlpine, Writing of his formative years in his 1999 memoir Bagman To Swagman, McAlpine recalled: ...For my family were contractors and they lived for their work. As a child, I had ridden on the foreman's shoulders, seen concrete mixers as big as four-storey buildings and cranes that towered hundreds of feet into the air, and been terrified of the rattle of the giant air compressors. As a young man, I was caught in the excitement of our trade. My family lived construction and talked construction, and, as a youth, I dreamt construction. Power stations and docks, skyscrapers and hotels were to be built. The construction boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s was well under way. He then worked on a McAlpine building site on the South Bank, keeping time and dealing with wage packets. At the age of 21, McAlpine became a director of the company, at the time named Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons. He made money in property development in Australia and worked in the building business until he entered politics. McAlpine founded his own publishing house in London in the 1960s, and was an art dealer, art collector, zookeeper (at the Pearl Coast Zoological Gardens in Broome, Western Australia), horticulturist, beekeeper, agriculturist, gardener and passionate traveller. ==Politics==

Though the inner circle of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson had once considered appointing McAlpine as a fundraiser, McAlpine was entranced by the new Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher at a 1975 dinner party, and she soon appointed him Conservative treasurer, a position he would retain until 1990. He served on the Council from 1981 to 1982. Other public bodies on which McAlpine served included the Theatre Investment Fund, of which he was chairman. taking the title Baron McAlpine of West Green, of West Green in the County of Hampshire. As party treasurer, McAlpine raised large sums to support the Conservative Party in elections. In 1997 he became the Referendum Party's leader following Goldsmith's death, although the party would soon become defunct. He was very critical of the Conservative Party under William Hague McAlpine liked the Conservative Party chairman Cecil Parkinson, and disliked Parkinson's successor, John Gummer, whom he thought dull. Owing to his influence over Thatcher, McAlpine was said to have ensured Gummer's replacement as party chairman by Norman Tebbit. ==Australia==

McAlpine first went to Western Australia around 1960, after hearing that the government was to privatise road-building. In the mid-1960s he went to Perth to work, developing office blocks and the first five-star hotel in the city. In the 1980s McAlpine attempted to invigorate the tourism business in Broome. McAlpine had first been impressed with Broome in the late 1970s. He felt the area had great tourism potential. He invested $500 million on various developments, such as restoring crumbling buildings, fixing up a cinema, and creating the Cable Beach Resort club and the Pearl Coast Zoological Gardens. He bought a stake in a pearl farm, and helped promote the South Sea Pearl. He promoted local culture including Aboriginal artwork. He spent several months a year there, for a time. McAlpine gave to charities as well as startup businesses. The changes were not without controversy, explored for example in the 1990 documentary film Lord of the Bush by Tom Zubrycki. Economic conditions worsened in the early 1990s, and tourism was affected by the 1989 Australian pilots' dispute. McAlpine had to sell his stakes and leave in the mid-1990s. The zoo closed, but many of his efforts lasted, such as the Cable Beach club. When he revisited Broome in 2012 he was described positively in several media stories and the town leaders honoured him as Freeman of the Municipality. ==Art and collecting==

McAlpine had been a passionate collector of a wide range of objets d'art and ephemera since his youth. He had a "cupboard of curiosities" as a child, including a snake in a bottle, and a piece of a Zeppelin air ship. He was also interested in modern sculpturists such as William Turnbull, Naum Gabo, Michael Bolus and David Annesley. McAlpine also donated hundreds of erotic pictures to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, including works by Bob Carlos Clarke, Karl Lagerfeld, David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and others. Bloomsbury Book Auctions sold many of these items in 2003. The auction was entitled "A (Very) Private Collection: Fashion and Eroticism Photographs 1970–1990". One of these, a 50 foot high column topped by an elaborately carved design, bears a Latin inscription declaring that "this monument was built with a great deal of money which otherwise someday would have been given into the hands of the public revenue". McAlpine also constructed a classical triumphal arch topped with an obelisk that bears a plaque dedicating the arch to the "first lady Prime Minister of Great Britain". Other features in the folly garden include a ''trompe-l'œil'' nymphaeum, a smoke house, an "eye catcher", Chinese cow sheds and an island gazebo. ==Personal life==

McAlpine lived in several parts of the world including England, He was in a coma for a month on a life-support machine following his second heart operation, He married for the first time in 1964, to Sarah Baron. and divorced shortly after McAlpine's second heart operation, owing to his adultery. After The Guardian reported that the accusations were the result of mistaken identity, McAlpine issued a strong denial that he was in any way involved. The accuser, a former care home resident, unreservedly apologised after seeing a photograph of McAlpine and realising that he had been mistaken, leading to a report in The Daily Telegraph that the BBC was "in chaos". The BBC also then apologised. The BBC subsequently paid McAlpine £185,000 in damages plus costs, which he donated to charity. He also won £125,000 in damages plus costs from ITV following a November 2012 edition of This Morning which linked Conservative politicians to allegations of child sex abuse, again donating the damages to charity. McAlpine expressed his intention to pursue twenty "high profile" Twitter users who had reported or alluded to the rumours. He decided to drop the defamation claims against those with fewer than 500 followers in return for a £25 donation to the Children in Need charity. One high-profile case was settled out of court: in March 2013, McAlpine's representatives reached an agreement with writer George Monbiot, who had tweeted on the case and had at that time more than 55,000 followers on Twitter, for the latter to carry out work on behalf of three charities of his choice whose value amounts to £25,000 as compensation. Monbiot described this settlement as "unprecedented" and "eminently decent", reflecting well on McAlpine. Another case went to court: McAlpine v Bercow. The defendant was Sally Bercow, the wife of John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, a high-profile, politically neutral role. On 24 May 2013, the High Court of Justice ruled that her tweet, "Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*", was libellous. The two parties agreed on a settlement, and McAlpine donated the damages awarded to the charity Children in Need. Death Lord McAlpine of West Green died on 17 January 2014 at his home in Italy, aged 71. ==Arms==

McAlpine wrote (sometimes in collaboration) a number of books and contributed to periodicals, including The World of Interiors. A partial bibliography follows. • The Servant. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. . This work discusses his relationship with Thatcher. He later re-released it as part of a compilation called The Ruthless Leader, which also included The Art of War by Sun Tzu and The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, along with an introduction. • Letters to a Young Politician – From his uncle. London: Faber & Faber, 1995. . • Once a Jolly Bagman: Memoirs. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997. . Contains numerous critical comments about former associates such as John Major, Edward Heath, and Michael Heseltine. • The New Machiavelli: The art of politics in business. New York; Chichester: John Wiley, 1998. . • Collecting and Display, with Cathy Giangrande. London: Conran Octopus, 1998. . • ''The Collector's Companion: A source book of public collections in Europe and the USA'', with Cathy Giangrande. London: Everyman, 2001. . • Bagman to Swagman. London: Allen & Unwin, 1999. . • Adventures of a Collector. London: Allen & Unwin, 2002. . • Triumph from Failure: Lessons from Life for Business Success, with Kate Dixey. New York: Texere, 2003. . ==References==