John Cordle; MP brought down by the Poulson Affair
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: JOHN BARNES
Cordle: trenchant UPPA
JOHN CORDLE was not unfairly characterised recently by
Reginald Maudling's biographer Lewis Baston as "a blustering
moraliser with an intriguing private life and business links
that stretched from West Africa to the Church of England
newspaper".
Cordle was one of three MPs - Maudling and the Labour MP
Alfred Roberts were the others - who were associated with
the corrupt architect and businessman John Poulson, and were
subject to an investigation by a Select Committee of the
House of Commons in the winter of 1976-77. Its report in
July 1977 found that Cordle had been guilty of conduct
amounting to a contempt of Parliament and, although he
attempted to brazen it out, it became clear that he was
bound to be expelled.
After a largely hostile meeting of the 1922 Committee, the
Conservative whips brought pressure to bear on him to
resign. Four days before the report was to be debated, he
did so. Although he admitted to receiving pounds 5,628 from
two Poulson companies to promote their interests in West
Africa, he denied any impropriety, but told the House that
"if a group of my colleagues decide unanimously that I was
at fault in a matter, then I must bow to their judgement".
He left the House in tears, but few were shed for him. He
had set himself up as the very model of a hardline moralist
and he was thought to be sanctimonious and something of a
hypocrite. His resignation almost certainly saved the much
more popular Maudling from a similar fate.
When he bought The Church of England Newspaper in 1959,
Cordle declared his intention to use it to campaign against
easy divorce and for "high standards of public life,
discipline in the home and a decisive approach to
hooliganism and juvenile delinquency". But his own life fell
short of the standards he had set for others and, while no
outsider can know the truth of any marital breakdown, two
marriages ended in an atmosphere of well-publicised rancour.
When his first wife, Grace, sought to have him jailed for
breaching a custody order, Cordle escaped penalty by
pleading parliamentary privilege. However the judge
condemned his conduct as "utterly disgraceful". In the
terminal stages of his second marriage, to Venetia Maynard,
he imposed a 7 o'clock curfew on those visiting his wife and
posted security guards to prevent his mother-in-law from
coming to stay. His final marriage, to his children's nanny,
Terttu Heikura, 35 years his junior, lasted until his death.
Much of the appalling tragedy that beset Cordle was not of
his own making. One grandson was killed in a road accident
and a granddaughter electrocuted. One son, who subsequently
made good, was jailed for theft and a daughter became a
heroin addict and prostitute. Not surprisingly perhaps the
tabloids began to talk of the curse of the Cordles.
John Cordle was born in London in 1912, was educated at the
City of London School and joined the family firm, E.W.
Cordle and Son, which made family linen and supplied linen
to hospitals and hotels. In 1940 he enlisted in the RAF and
eventually reached the rank of flight lieutenant.
Returning to the family business in 1946, he found that
large sums of money had been embezzled from the firm, and he
had to pay between pounds 60,000 and pounds 70,000 to the
Inland Revenue as a result of the firm's books' being
doctored. He took over as managing director in 1946, holding
the position until 1968 when he became chairman of the
board. By 1952 he had sufficiently rebuilt his finances to
be in a position to become a member of Lloyd's and he led an
active social life. He was a Gold Staff Officer at the
Coronation and, as a friend of the Princess, an usher at
Princess Margaret's wedding.
A staunch evangelical, Cordle became a lay reader at
Rochester Cathedral and served on the Archbishops'
Commission on Evangelism and the Church Assembly. He was
Treasurer of the World's Evangelical Alliance from 1949
until 1953 and became a long-serving member of the Oxford
Churches Patronage Trust, taking over the chair in 1955.
Although he was adopted as the Conservative candidate for
Wolverhampton North-East in 1949, he did not contest the
seat in 1950 and fought his first parliamentary contest for
the Wrekin in 1951, losing by 1,804 votes. The seat was won
for the Conservatives by William Yates in 1955 and Cordle
did not contest that election, perhaps because his first
marriage was breaking up after 17 years.
He finally made the Commons in 1959, beneficiary of an
extraordinary set of circumstances in which Nigel Nicolson
was displaced as the MP for Bournemouth East and
Christchurch, largely for opposing the Suez operation, and
his chosen successor was revealed as an Empire Loyalist and
in turn dismissed. Cordle was a staunch supporter of Anthony
Eden's ill-fated enterprise and clearly on the right of the
party. He proved a popular choice and was undoubtedly a
hard-working constituency Member.
He was good-looking and forthright, and developed a fine
command of trenchant phraseology, which was usually devoted
to the denunciation of his pet hates - the Roman Church,
pornography and homosexuality. He denounced the BBC for
putting on un-Christian and anti-moral plays, spearheaded
calls in the House of Commons to have Lady Chatterley's
Lover banned, and attacked the film Lolita. "The wind of
change in our affluent society has brought in its wake a
gust of lust," he believed, and he blamed the rise in sexual
disease on filthy books. Homes were being "subjected to
suggestive, dirty and corrupting plays on ITV and BBC" and
"Priests who indulge in the abominable and intolerable
practices of buggery and homosexual genital sex should be
expelled from the Church".
When John Profumo resigned in 1963, Cordle was predictably
censorious:
Men who choose to live in adultery ought not to be appointed
to serve our Queen and country . . . I was appalled to hear
that our beloved Queen should be so wrongly advised as to
give an audience to a minister who has proved himself so
untrustworthy.
It was a series of remarks that many recalled when Cordle
incurred the wrath of his colleagues 14 years later.
Cordle's company traded extensively in West Africa. In
December 1963 he was approached for "promotion
representation overseas for Construction Promotions Ltd in
West Africa and Libya". Construction Promotions was one of
John Poulson's companies and within weeks Cordle was sending
back reports and asking for a formal contract and expenses.
In March 1965, he wrote to Poulson setting out his efforts
country by country and, in terms that were to prove fatal to
his parliamentary career, he noted the use of his official
positions to further the firm's interests, the Conservative
West Africa Committee (of which he was Chairman) "to give me
further entree in that region", the use of the Commons for a
Construction Promotions business lunch, and chairmanship of
the Anglo-Libyan parliamentary group as a useful position to
give the firm the right contacts.
In April 1965 an agreement was made with another Poulson
firm, Ropergate Services, but by November 1967 the two men
were at odds. Poulson considered he had been "conned", but
Cordle took legal action to ensure that his contractual
relationship was perpetuated and he stayed on the payroll
until 1970, collecting pounds 5,628 over six years. It was
his failure to declare an interest in debate that proved
fatal to him when the select committee came to consider his
activities.
Poulson had been forced to file for bankruptcy in 1972 and
his meticulous files allowed corruption charges to be
successfully brought against him and several associates.
However, when the DPP consulted two senior barristers in the
autumn of 1974 about the activities of the MPs involved,
they advised that no charge for corruption could lie against
an MP.
Harold Wilson's response to the evidence of corruption was
to set up the Salmon Commission, and in the course of its
investigations Salmon recommended that Cordle's case should
be subjected to parliamentary investigation. When the
Attorney General failed to act, a member of the commission
leaked material relating to MPs to Adam Raphael of The
Observer, and the story was printed under the headline
"Corruption - 3 MPs escape prosecution". The Commons was
outraged and the Government was forced to act.
Cordle never ceased to protest that he had been the victim
of slurs and innuendo and in 1991 he was finally able to get
the Clerk of the House of Commons to acknowledge "the very
narrow basis of the committee's criticism, and the
moderating factors to which they drew attention".
John Cordle resigned chairmanship of the family firm in 1981
and in retirement played an active part in local charities.
He opened his home, Malmesbury House in the Close at
Salisbury, to the public, but played little further part in
public life.
John Howard Cordle, politician: born London 11 October 1912;
managing director, E.W. Cordle and Son 1946-68, chairman
1968-81; MP (Conservative) for Bournemouth East and
Christchurch 1959-74, for Bournemouth East 1974- 77; owner,
Church of England Newspaper 1960-71; married first 1938
(three sons, and one son and one daughter deceased; marriage
dissolved 1956), 1957 Venetia Maynard (one son, three
daughters; marriage dissolved 1971), 1976 Terttu Heijura
(two sons); died Salisbury, Wiltshire 22 November 2004.