Philip Goodhart

Sir Philip Carter Goodhart (3 November 1925 – 5 July 2015) was a British Conservative politician, the son of Arthur Lehman Goodhart.

Biography Goodhart attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. He contested Consett in 1950 while still a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was elected Member of Parliament for Beckenham at a 1957 by-election, and continued to represent the seat until his retirement in 1992. He made his maiden speech on army equipment and later on in life became involved in the preservation of warships, to which he devoted much time and about which he also published books.

In his book Referendum (1971), Goodhart argued that the EEC membership referendum, then under discussion in the context of the United Kingdom (UK) joining the European Economic Community (EEC), could in fact serve to entrench constitutional safeguards that the UK lacked, quoting Arthur Balfour's contribution to the debate on the Parliament Bill (later the Parliament Act 1911): "In the referendum lies our hope of getting the sort of constitutional security which every other country but our own enjoys ..." (Referendum, ). He wrote an account of the 1975 referendum campaign, Full-hearted Consent (1975), and also The 1922: The Story of the 1922 Committee (1973).

Goodhart was a junior Northern Ireland minister (1979–1981) and a junior defence minister (1981). He was also a member of the Founding Council of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford.

In 1950, Goodhart married Valerie Forbes Winant (died 2014), a niece of John Gilbert Winant. They had seven children: Arthur, Sarah, David, Rachel, Harriet, Rebecca and Daniel. The couple lived in Whitebarn, Youlbury Woods, Oxford. Goodhart died in 2015, aged 89. His son David is the director of the Demos thinktank and writes for Prospect magazine.

Works