John Constable
Self-portrait 1806, pencil on paper, Tate Gallery London. His only indisputable self-portrait, drawn by an arrangement of mirrors.[1]
Born	(1776-06-11)11 June 1776 Suffolk, East Anglia, England
Died	31 March 1837(1837-03-31) (aged 60) London, England
Nationality	English
Field	Painting
Movement	Romanticism
Works	Dedham Vale (1802); The Hay Wain(1821)

John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".^[2]

His most famous paintings include Dedham Vale of 1802 and The Hay Wain of 1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England.

Biography[link]

Early career[link]

John Constable was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann (Watts) Constable. His father was a wealthy corn merchant, owner of Flatford Mill in East Bergholt and, later, Dedham Mill in Essex. Golding Constable also owned his own small ship, The Telegraph, which he moored at Mistley on the Stour estuary and used to transport corn to London. He was a cousin of the London tea merchant, Abram Newman. Although Constable was his parents' second son, his older brother was mentally handicapped and so John was expected to succeed his father in the business, and after a brief period at a boarding school in Lavenham, he was enrolled in a day school in Dedham. Constable worked in the corn business after leaving school, but his younger brother Abram eventually took over the running of the mills.

In his youth, Constable embarked on amateur sketching trips in the surrounding Suffolk and Essex countryside that was to become the subject of a large proportion of his art. These scenes, in his own words, "made me a painter, and I am grateful"; "the sound of water escaping from mill dams etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things."^[3] He was introduced to George Beaumont, a collector, who showed him his prized Hagar and the Angel by Claude Lorrain, which inspired Constable. Later, while visiting relatives in Middlesex, he was introduced to the professional artist John Thomas Smith, who advised him on painting but also urged him to remain in his father's business rather than take up art professionally.

Dedham Vale (1802)

In 1799, Constable persuaded his father to let him pursue art, and Golding even granted him a small allowance. Entering the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer, he attended life classes and anatomical dissections as well as studying and copying Old Masters. Among works that particularly inspired him during this period were paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens, Annibale Carracci and Jacob van Ruisdael. He also read widely among poetry and sermons, and later proved a notably articulate artist. By 1803, he was exhibiting paintings at the Royal Academy.

In 1802 he refused the position of drawing master at Great Marlow Military College, a move which Benjamin West (then master of the RA) counselled would mean the end of his career. In that year, Constable wrote a letter to John Dunthorne in which he spelled out his determination to become a professional landscape painter:

His early style has many of the qualities associated with his mature work, including a freshness of light, colour and touch, and reveals the compositional influence of the Old Masters he had studied, notably of Claude Lorrain.^[5] Constable's usual subjects, scenes of ordinary daily life, were unfashionable in an age that looked for more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins. He did, however, make occasional trips further afield. For example, in 1803 he spent almost a month aboard the East Indiaman ship Coutts as it visited south-east coastal ports, and in 1806 he undertook a two-month tour of the Lake District.^[6] But he told his friend and biographer Charles Leslie that the solitude of the mountains oppressed his spirits; Leslie went on to write:

Wivenhoe Park (1816)

In order to make ends meet, Constable took up portraiture, which he found dull work—though he executed many fine portraits. He also painted occasional religious pictures, but according to John Walker, "Constable's incapacity as a religious painter cannot be overstated."^[8]

Constable adopted a routine of spending the winter in London and painting at East Bergholt in the summer. And in 1811 he first visited John Fisher and his family in Salisbury, a city whose cathedral and surrounding landscape were to inspire some of his greatest paintings.

Marriage and maturity[link]

Maria Bicknell, painted by Constable in 1816

From 1809 onwards, his childhood friendship with Maria Bicknell developed into a deep, mutual love. But their engagement in 1816 was opposed by Maria's grandfather, Dr. Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt, who considered the Constables his social inferiors and threatened Maria with disinheritance.

Maria's father, Charles Bicknell, a solicitor, was reluctant to see Maria throw away this inheritance, and Maria herself pointed out that a penniless marriage would detract from any chances John had of making a career in painting.

Golding and Ann Constable, while approving the match, held out no prospect of supporting the marriage until Constable was financially secure; but they died in quick succession, and Constable inherited a fifth share in the family business.

Weymouth Bay (c. 1816)

John and Maria's marriage in October 1816 at St Martin-in-the-Fields (with Fisher officiating) was followed by time at Fisher's vicarage and a honeymoon tour of the south coast, where the sea at Weymouth and Brighton stimulated Constable to develop new techniques of brilliant colour and vivacious brushwork. At the same time, a greater emotional range began to register in his art.^[9]

Although he had scraped an income from painting, it was not until 1819 that Constable sold his first important canvas, The White Horse, which led to a series of "six footers", as he called his large-scale paintings.

He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy that year, and in 1821 he showed The Hay Wain (a view from Flatford Mill) at the Academy's exhibition. Théodore Géricault saw it on a visit to London and was soon praising Constable in Paris, where a dealer, John Arrowsmith, bought four paintings, including The Hay Wain, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1824, winning a gold medal.

Of Constable's colour, Delacroix wrote in his journal: "What he says here about the green of his meadows can be applied to every tone".^[10] Delacroix repainted the background of his 1824 Massacre de Scio after seeing the Constables at Arrowsmith's Gallery, which he said had done him a great deal of good.^[11]

In his lifetime Constable was to sell only twenty paintings in England, but in France he sold more than twenty in just a few years. Despite this, he refused all invitations to travel internationally to promote his work, writing to Francis Darby: "I would rather be a poor man [in England] than a rich man abroad."^[8]

In 1825, perhaps due partly to the worry of his wife's ill-health, the uncongeniality of living in Brighton ("Piccadilly by the Seaside"^[12]), and the pressure of numerous outstanding commissions, he quarrelled with Arrowsmith and lost his French outlet.

After the birth of her seventh child in January 1828, Maria fell ill and died of tuberculosis that November at the age of forty-one. Intensely saddened, Constable wrote to his brother Golding, "hourly do I feel the loss of my departed Angel—God only knows how my children will be brought up...the face of the World is totally changed to me".^[13]

Thereafter, he always dressed in black and was, according to Leslie, "a prey to melancholy and anxious thoughts". He cared for his seven children alone for the rest of his life.

The Hay Wain (1821)

Shortly before her death, Maria's father had died, leaving her £20,000. Constable speculated disastrously with this money, paying for the engraving of several mezzotints of some of his landscapes in preparation for a publication. He was hesitant and indecisive, nearly fell out with his engraver, and when the folios were published, could not interest enough subscribers. Constable collaborated closely with the talented mezzotinter David Lucas on some 40 prints after his landscapes, one of which went through 13 proof stages, corrected by Constable in pencil and paint. Constable said, "Lucas showed me to the public without my faults", but the venture was not a financial success.^[14]

He was elected to the Royal Academy in February 1829, at the age of 52, and in 1831 was appointed Visitor at the Royal Academy, where he seems to have been popular with the students.

He also began to deliver public lectures on the history of landscape painting, which were attended by distinguished audiences. In a series of such lectures at the Royal Institution, Constable proposed a threefold thesis: firstly, landscape painting is scientific as well as poetic; secondly, the imagination cannot alone produce art to bear comparison with reality; and thirdly, no great painter was ever self-taught.

He also later spoke against the new Gothic Revival movement, which he considered mere "imitation".

In 1835, his last lecture to the students of the Royal Academy, in which he praised Raphael and called the Academy the "cradle of British art", was "cheered most heartily".^[15] He died on the night of the 31st March, apparently from indigestion, and was buried with Maria in the graveyard of St John-at-Hampstead, Hampstead. (His children John Charles Constable and Charles Golding Constable are also buried in this family tomb.)

Art[link]

The Cornfield (1826)

Constable quietly rebelled against the artistic culture that taught artists to use their imagination to compose their pictures rather than nature itself. He told Leslie, "When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture".^[16]

Although Constable produced paintings throughout his life for the "finished" picture market of patrons and R.A. exhibitions, constant refreshment in the form of on-the-spot studies was essential to his working method, and he never satisfied himself with following a formula. "The world is wide", he wrote, "no two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other."^[17]

Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes in order to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and they continue to interest artists, scholars and the general public. The oil sketches of The Leaping Horse and The Hay Wain, for example, convey a vigour and expressiveness missing from Constable's finished paintings of the same subjects. Possibly more than any other aspect of Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him in retrospect to have been an avant-garde painter, one who demonstrated that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new direction.

Constable's watercolours were also remarkably free for their time: the almost mystical Stonehenge, 1835, with its double rainbow, is often considered to be one of the greatest watercolours ever painted.^[17] When he exhibited it in 1836, Constable appended a text to the title: "The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period."^[18]

In addition to the full-scale oil sketches, Constable completed numerous observational studies of landscapes and clouds, determined to become more scientific in his recording of atmospheric conditions. The power of his physical effects was sometimes apparent even in the full-scale paintings which he exhibited in London; The Chain Pier, 1827, for example, prompted a critic to write: "the atmosphere possesses a characteristic humidity about it, that almost imparts the wish for an umbrella".^[2]

Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (c.1824)

The sketches themselves were the first ever done in oils directly from the subject in the open air. To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used broken brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he scumbled over lighter passages, creating an impression of sparkling light enveloping the entire landscape. One of the most expressionistic and powerful of all his studies is Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, painted about 1824 at Brighton, which captures with slashing dark brushstrokes the immediacy of an exploding cumulus shower at sea.^[12] Constable also became interested in painting rainbow effects, for example in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831, and in Cottage at East Bergholt, 1833.

To the sky studies he added notes, often on the back of the sketches, of the prevailing weather conditions, direction of light, and time of day, believing that the sky was "the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment" in a landscape painting.^[19] In this habit he is known to have been influenced by the pioneering work of the meteorologist Luke Howard on the classification of clouds; Constable's annotations of his own copy of Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena by Thomas Forster show him to have been fully abreast of meteorological terminology.^[20] "I have done a good deal of skying", Constable wrote to Fisher on 23 October 1821; "I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that most arduous one among the rest".^[21]

Constable once wrote in a letter to Leslie, "My limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up".^[22] He could never have imagined how influential his honest techniques would turn out to be. Constable's art inspired not only contemporaries like Géricault and Delacroix, but the Barbizon School, and the French impressionists of the late nineteenth century.

Gallery[link]

• 

  Boat-building near Flatford Mill 1815, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

• 

  Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds c. 1825. As a gesture of appreciation for John Fisher, the Bishop of Salisbury, who commissioned this painting, Constable included the Bishop and his wife in the canvas. Their figures can be seen at the bottom left of the painting, behind the fence and under the shade of the trees.

• 

  The Opening of Waterloo Bridge seen from Whitehall Stairs, June 18 1817, oil on canvas, c. 1832. Tate Britain

Selected paintings[link]

• Dedham Vale (1802) - Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Landscape: Two Boys Fishing (1813) -Anglesey Abbey, Cambs, NT
• Landscape: Ploughing Scene in Suffolk (1814, revised c.1816 and 1831) - Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT
• The Stour Valley And Dedham Village (1814–1815) - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston^[23]
• Boat-building near Flatford Mill (1815) - Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Golding Constable's Flower Garden (1815) - Ipswich Museum, Ipswich
• Golding Constable's Kitchen Garden (1815) - Ipswich Museum, Ipswich
• Portrait of Maria Bicknell, Mrs. John Constable (1816) - Tate Gallery, London
• Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816) - National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• Flatford Mill (original title Scene on a Navigable River; 1816–17) - Tate Gallery, London
• Weymouth Bay (1816–17) - National Gallery, London
• The White Horse (original title A Scene on the river Stour) (1819) - Frick Collection, New York City
• Hampstead Heath (1820) - Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
• Stratford Mill (1820) - National Gallery, London
• The Hay Wain (original title Landscape: Noon; 1821) - National Gallery, London
• View on the Stour near Dedham (1822) - The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
• Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds (1823) - Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Seascape Study with Rain Clouds (1824–25) - Royal Academy of Arts, London
• Brighton Beach (c.1824–26) - Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin
• The Leaping Horse (1825) - Royal Academy of Arts, London
• The Cornfield (1826) - National Gallery, London
• Dedham Vale (1828) - National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
• Hadleigh Castle (1829) - Tate Gallery, London
• Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831) - Private collection; on loan to National Gallery, London
• The Opening of Waterloo Bridge seen from Whitehall Stairs, June 18, 1817 (c.1832) - Tate Britain, London
• The Valley Farm (1835) - Tate Gallery, London
• Arundel Mill and Castle (c.1836–37) - Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH

Constable locations[link]

Bridge Cottage is a National Trust property, open to the public. Nearby Flatford Mill and Willie Lott's cottage (the house visible in The Hay Wain) are used by the Field Studies Council for courses.

Notes[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Bailey, Anthony (2007), John Constable: A Kingdom of His Own, London: Vintage, ISBN 978-1-84413-833-3 
• Constable, Freda (1975), John Constable, Lavenham: Terence Dalton, ISBN 0-900963-54-9 
• Cormack, Malcolm (1986), Constable, Oxford: Phaidon, ISBN 0-7148-2350-3 .
• Fleming-Williams, Ian (1976), Constable: Landscape Watercolours & Drawings, London: Tate, ISBN 0-905005-10-4 
• Fleming-Williams, Ian; Parris, Leslie (1984), The Discovery of Constable, London: Hamish Hamilton, ISBN 0-241-11248-6 
• Fraser, John Lloyd (1976), John Constable: 1776–1837, Newton Abbot, UK: Readers Union, ISBN 0-09-125540-6 
• Gayford, Martin (2009), Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter, Fig Tree 
• Holmes, Charles John (2012), John Constable: Illustrated, Kindle: The Bookmill, ISBN 978-0-9567303-6-7 
• Kelder, Diane (1980), The Great Book of French Impressionism, New York: Abbeville Press, ISBN 0-89659-151-4 
• Leslie, C. R. (1995), Mayne, Jonathan, ed., Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, London: Phaidon, ISBN 0-7148-3360-6 
• Lyles,, Anne, editor (2006), Constable: The great landscapes, London: Tate Publishing, ISBN 1-85437-635-7 
• Mayor, A. Hyatt (1980), Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-00326-2 .
• Parkinson, Ronald (1998), John Constable: The Man and His Art, London: V&A, ISBN 1-85177-243-X 
• Parris, Leslie; Fleming-Williams, Ian (1991), Constable, London: Tate, ISBN 1-85437-070-7 
• Parris, Leslie; Fleming-Williams, Ian (1982), Lionel Constable, London: Tate, ISBN 0-905005-38-4 
• Parris, Leslie; Fleming-Williams, Ian; Shields, Conal (1976), Constable: Paintings, Watercolours & Drawings, London: Tate Gallery, ISBN 0-905005-15-5 
• Pool, Phoebe (1964), John Constable, London: Blandford, OCLC 3365016 
• Reynolds, Graham (1976), Constable: The Natural Painter, St Albans, UK: Panther, ISBN 0-586-04401-9 
• Rhyne, Charles (2006), "The Remarkable Story of the ‘Six-Foot Sketches’", Constable: The Great Landscapes, ed. Anne Lyles, London: Tate, ISBN 978-1-85437-635-0 
• Rhyne, Charles (1990), John Constable: Toward a Complete Chronology, Portland, Oregon: Author, ISBN 0-9627197-0-6 
• Rosenthal, Michael (1987), Constable, London: Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0-500-20211-7 
• Rosenthal, Michael (1983), Constable: The Painter and His Landscape, New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-03014-2 
• Smart, Alastair; Brooks, Attfield (1976), Constable and His Country, London: Elek, ISBN 0-236-40011-8 
• Sunderland, John (1986), Constable, London: Phaidon, ISBN 978-0-7148-2754-4 .
• Thornes, John E. (1999), John Constable's Skies, Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, ISBN 1-902459-02-4 
• Vaughan, William (2002), John Constable, London: Tate, ISBN 1-85437-434-6 .
• Walker, John (1979), Constable, London: Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0-500-09133-1 
• Wilcox, Timothy (2011), Constable and Salisbury. The soul of landscape, London: Scala, ISBN 978-1-85759-678-6 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: John Constable

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Constable

• Tate Britain Exhibition Revives Turner and Constable's Old Rivalry, The Times of London, 22 September 2009
• Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
• Constable: The Great Landscapes (Tate Britain 2006): an illustrated review Retrieved 29 September 2006.
• John Constable: a complete chronology
• Constable's Oil Sketches Victoria and Albert Museum
• A Sketchbook by Constable Victoria and Albert Museum
• 390 paintings by John Constable at www.John-Constable.org
• John Constable at Olga's Gallery
• Biography at Webmuseum, Paris
• John Constable at Find-A-Grave
• John Constable — English Landscape Painter
• Gallery of Constable Paintings at MuseumSyndicate
• Aug 2007-Lost Constable discovered
• John Constable paintings & timeline
• John Constable at Art-Route
• Portraits by the artist as a young man: Constable's parents finally identified, The Guardian, March 4, 2009
• Constable Museum - thatched cottages, Flatford

vep:Konstebl Džon

The Right Honourable Michael Portillo
Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer
In office 1 February 2000 – 18 September 2001
Leader	William Hague
Preceded by	Francis Maude
Succeeded by	Michael Howard
Secretary of State for Defence
In office 5 July 1995 – 2 May 1997
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	Malcolm Rifkind
Succeeded by	George Robertson
Secretary of State for Employment
In office 20 July 1994 – 5 July 1995
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	David Hunt
Succeeded by	Gillian Shephard (Education and Employment)
Chief Secretary to the Treasury
In office 11 April 1992 – 20 July 1994
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	David Mellor
Succeeded by	Jonathan Aitken
Member of Parliament for Kensington and Chelsea
In office 25 November 1999 – 5 May 2005
Preceded by	Alan Clark
Succeeded by	Malcolm Rifkind
Member of Parliament for Enfield Southgate
In office 13 December 1984 – 1 May 1997
Preceded by	Anthony Berry
Succeeded by	Stephen Twigg
Personal details
Born	(1953-05-26) 26 May 1953 (age 59) Bushey, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom
Political party	Conservative
Spouse(s)	Carolyn Eadie (1982–present)
Alma mater	Peterhouse, Cambridge
Website	www.michaelportillo.co.uk

Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo (born 26 May 1953) is a British journalist, broadcaster, and former Conservative Party politician and Cabinet Minister. Portillo was first elected to the House of Commons in a by-election in 1984; a strong admirer of Margaret Thatcher, and a Eurosceptic, Portillo served as a junior minister under both Thatcher and John Major, before entering the cabinet in 1992. Seen as a likely challenger to Major during the 1995 Conservative leadership election, Portillo ultimately stayed loyal. As Defence Secretary, Portillo pressed for a purist Thatcherite course of "clear blue water", separating the policies of the Conservatives from Labour.

Portillo unexpectedly lost his Enfield Southgate seat at the 1997 general election; political commentators widely believe that he would have been elected Conservative leader had he retained it. Returning to the Commons through a by-election in Kensington and Chelsea in 1999, Portillo rejoined the front bench as Shadow Chancellor, although his relationship with Conservative Leader William Hague was strained. Standing for the leadership of the party in 2001, Portillo came a narrow third place behind Iain Duncan Smith and Kenneth Clarke. Portillo retired from the Commons at the 2005 general election, and has since pursued his media interests, presenting a wide range of television and radio programmes.

Early life and career[link]

Born Michael Denzil Portillo in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England, Portillo took the name Xavier at confirmation. His father was an exiled Spanish republican, Luis Gabriel Portillo (1907–1993).^[1] His mother is Cora (née Blyth); her father was John Blyth, a prosperous linen mill owner from Kirkcaldy.^[2] An early brush with fame came in 1961 at the age of 8, when Portillo starred in a television advertisement for Ribena, a blackcurrant cordial drink. He was educated at Stanburn Primary School in Stanmore, Middlesex, and Harrow County School for Boys^[3] and then won a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he came under the influence of Maurice Cowling.^[4]

Portillo graduated in 1975 with a first-class degree in history, and after a brief stint with Ocean Transport and Trading Co., a freight firm, he joined the Conservative Research Department in 1976. Following the Conservative victory in 1979 he became a government adviser. He left to work for Kerr-McGee Oil from 1981–1983 and fought his first, unsuccessful, election in the 1983 general election, in the Labour-held seat of Birmingham Perry Barr, losing against Jeff Rooker.

Portillo has been married to Carolyn Eadie since 1982.^[5]

Member of Parliament[link]

Portillo returned to advisory work for the government and in December 1984 he stood for and won the Enfield Southgate by-election following the murder of the incumbent, Sir Anthony Berry, in the bombing by the IRA of the Grand Hotel in Brighton.

Portillo retained the Enfield Southgate seat until 1997. Initially he was a Parliamentary Private Secretary to John Moore and then an assistant whip. In 1987 he was made under secretary for social security, in 1988 he was given his first ministerial post as Minister of State for Transport. He has claimed that "saving the Settle to Carlisle railway was his greatest achievement in politics."^[6]

He then held the local government portfolio (1990), arguing in favour of the ultimately highly unpopular Community Charge system (popularly known as Poll Tax). He demonstrated a consistently right-of-centre line (exemplified by his insistence, in a well-publicised speech, of placing 'clear blue water' between the policies of the Conservatives and other parties) and was favoured by Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher. His rise continued under John Major; he was made a Cabinet Minister as Chief Secretary to the Treasury (1992), and admitted to the Privy Council the same year. Portillo subsequently held the portfolios of Employment (1994) and then Defence (1995–1997). His high profile led to constant attention from the media, including the magazine Private Eye, which mocked him as Portaloo. He was accused of vanity when the Alexandra Palace was hired to celebrate his ten years in politics.^[7]

Some saw the Defence Secretary post as a reward for his cautious loyalty to Major during the 1995 leadership challenge of John Redwood, following Major's "back me or sack me" resignation as party leader. Many urged Portillo to run against Major, and he set up a potential campaign headquarters with banks of telephone lines. He later admitted that this was an error; "I did not want to oppose [Major], but neither did I want to close the possibility of entering a second ballot if it came to that."^[8] His opponents within the party later used Portillo's apparent equivocation as an example of his indecisiveness, and he acknowledged that "ambiguity is unattractive."^[8]

As Defence Secretary Portillo invited criticism by invoking the motto of the SAS, "Who Dares, Wins", at a speech at the Conservative Party annual conference.

1997 election defeat[link]

Portillo's loss of the Enfield Southgate seat in the 1997 general election to Stephen Twigg came as a shock to many politicians and commentators, and came to symbolise the extent of the Conservatives' defeat. Memorably, he was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on the election night prior to the calling of his own seat and was stumped by the question of "Are we seeing the end of the Conservative Party as a credible force in British politics?" Portillo has since admitted that he knew he had lost his seat by the time of the interview:

'I saw that the exit poll was predicting a 160 seat majority for Labour. I thought, "when is Paxman going to ask me have I lost my seat?", because I deduced from that that I had. I then drove the car to my constituency and I knew I'd lost. But I also saw David Mellor. David Mellor had this really bad tempered spat with Jimmy Goldsmith [after the Putney election results had been announced].^[9] I saw this and I thought if there's one thing I do when I lose, I'm going to lose with as much dignity as I can muster and not be like this David Mellor, Goldsmith thing.'^[10][11]

Photographs and film coverage of Portillo's speech after the count have become iconic in symbolising the end of the period of Conservative government which had begun under Margaret Thatcher in 1979.^[12] Portillo's defeat represented a 17.4% swing to Labour. Although Twigg retained the seat with an increased majority in 2001, it returned to the Conservative Party in 2005 with a swing of 8.7%.

'Portillo moment'[link]

The 1997 loss, symbolising the loss of the election by the Conservative Party, has been referred to as "the Portillo moment", and in the cliché "Were you up for Portillo?" (i.e., "Were you awake/did you see Portillo's result announced on television?")^[13] Portillo himself commented, thirteen years later, that as a consequence "My name is now synonymous with eating a bucketload of shit in public."^[14]

Return to the House of Commons[link]

After the election, Portillo renewed his attachment to Kerr McGee but also undertook substantial media work including programmes for the BBC and Channel 4. He also seemed to be moving in his expressed opinions more towards the centre-right.

Portillo (left) being interviewed by Nick Robinson in 2001

In an interview with The Times given in the summer of 1999, Portillo admitted that "I had some homosexual experiences as a young person." ^[15] A few weeks after he had given this interview, the death of Alan Clark gave Portillo the opportunity to return to Parliament, despite Lord Tebbit accusing Portillo of lying about the extent of his sexual "deviance".^[16] Nonetheless Portillo comfortably won the by-election in late November 1999 to represent Kensington and Chelsea, traditionally one of the safest Conservative seats.

On 1 February 2000, William Hague promoted Portillo to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Chancellor. On 3 February Portillo stood opposite the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, in the House of Commons for the first time in his new role. During this session, Portillo made two significant announcements:

• The next Conservative Government will respect the independence of the Bank of England and will legislate to enhance that independence and increase accountability to Parliament
• The next Conservative Government will not repeal the national minimum wage^[17]

Both of these policies were flagship policies of New Labour and were opposed by large factions of the Conservative Party when introduced and indeed up until Portillo's announcement. Commentators suggested this was an example of Portillo taking the initiative in terms of Conservative Party policy and was the first step towards increasing acrimony between Hague and his Shadow Chancellor.

Bid for party leadership and retirement from politics[link]

Following the 2001 general election Portillo contested the leadership of the party. In the first ballot of Conservative MPs, he led well. However, there followed an onslaught of attacks from the right-wing press (notably the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail), including veiled (and not-so-veiled) references to his previous homosexual experiences and to his equivocation at the time of Major's 1995 resignation. He was knocked out in the final round of voting by Conservative MPs, leaving party members to choose between Iain Duncan Smith and Kenneth Clarke. When Duncan Smith was elected leader, Portillo returned to the backbenches. In March 2003, he voted in favour of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.^[18] In November 2003, having turned down an offer of a Shadow Cabinet post from the incoming Conservative leader Michael Howard,^[19] Portillo announced that he would not seek re-election^[20] and he left the House of Commons at the 2005 general election. His membership of the Conservative Party has since lapsed.^[21]

Business interests[link]

In September 2002 Portillo became a non-executive director of the defence company BAE Systems plc. He stepped down from that position in March 2006 owing to potential conflicts of interest.^[22]

He was a member of the board of the Kerr-McGee Corporation for a few months in 2006.^[23]

Media career[link]

From 2002 onwards, Portillo has developed an active career in media, both as a commentator on public affairs and as a writer and/or presenter of TV and radio documentaries.

Since 2003, Portillo has appeared in the BBC weekly political discussion programme This Week with Andrew Neil and, until September 2010, Labour MP Diane Abbott. Portillo has known Abbott for many years: they both attended schools in the London Borough of Harrow, Portillo and Abbott were in a joint school production of Romeo and Juliet, though not in the title roles.^[24] Later, whilst still at school, Portillo cast Abbott in a film version of Macbeth, but the film was never completed. She played Lady Macduff to his Macduff^[24] The chemistry between Portillo and Abbott has been credited with ensuring the programme's popularity.

Portillo has featured in a number of television documentaries, including one on Richard Wagner, of whose music he is a notable fan, and two on Spain: Great Railway Journeys: From Granada to Salamanca for BBC Two (2002), and a programme on Spanish wildlife for BBC Two's The Natural World series (2006) - Portillo is a fluent Spanish speaker. He showed an unexpectedly warm and perceptive side of his nature when he took over for one week the life, family and income of a single mother living on benefits in Wallasey - When Michael Portillo became a Single Mum, (2003).^[25] He chose to present Queen Elizabeth I for the BBC's series of Great Britons in 2002.

Since 2002, he has presented his own discussion series, "Dinner with Portillo", on BBC Four, in which political and social questions are explored by Portillo and his seven guests, over a four-course meal. As of 2007, in its fifth series, his guests had included Bianca Jagger, Grayson Perry, Francis Wheen, Seymour Hersh, PD James, Baroness Williams, George Galloway, Benazir Bhutto and Germaine Greer.

He is a long-serving member of the panel in the BBC Radio Four series The Moral Maze.

In 2007, he participated in the BBC television project The Verdict, serving, with other well-known figures, as a jury member hearing a fictional rape case. He was elected the jury's foreman.

The documentary How To Kill A Human Being, in the Horizon series, featured Portillo carrying out a survey of capital punishment methods (including undertaking some near death experiences himself) in an attempt to find an 'acceptable' form. It was broadcast on BBC Two on 15 January 2008.^[26] He has since made a second Horizon documentary, entitled How Violent Are You?,^[27] which was broadcast on 12 May 2009.

Portillo was the Chairman of the committee choosing the 2008 Man Booker Prize.^[28] He also interviewed clients of the French corporation Capgemini in a video publicity series.^[29]

In 2008 Portillo made a documentary as part of the BBC Headroom campaign (which explores mental health issues). Portillo's documentary 'Death of a School Friend' explores how the suicide of Portillo's classmate Gary Findon affected Findon's parents, brother, music teachers, school teachers, classmates, and Portillo himself. The programme was originally broadcast on Friday 7 November 2008.

In 2009, Portillo appeared in the second episode of the second series of The Supersizers eat... to discuss medieval cuisine and Magna Carta. Filmed in 2009 but first broadcast 4 January 2010, Portillo presented Great British Railway Journeys in which he explored, with the aid of George Bradshaw's 1840 railway guidebook, how the railways had a profound influence on the social, economic and political history of Britain. A second series was broadcast on BBC2 during 2011 and the third series began on the same channel in January 2012.

In September 2011 he presented a two-part series on BBC Radio 4 entitled Capitalism on Trial.^[30]

Portillo has written a regular column for The Sunday Times, contributes to other journals (he was a theatre critic for the New Statesman until May 2006), and is a regular radio broadcaster in the UK.

Charitable and voluntary activities[link]

Since 1998, Portillo has been a Commissioner of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).^[31] He is a trustee of the charity The Parliamentary Committee Against Anti-Semitism,^[32] and also President of DebRA, a British national charity working on behalf of people with the genetic skin blistering condition, Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB).^[23]

Portillo is the British chairman of the Anglo-Spanish organisation Tertulias, which organises annual meetings between the two countries.^[23] He is also a Vice President of Canning House, the Hispanic & Luso Brazilian Council.^[33]

Arts Endowment Fund[link]

On 4 July 2011 it was announced that Portillo will chair a new £55m Arts Endowment Fund, to be supported by the Arts Council, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Applicants will be able to bid for grants of between £500,000 and £5m, which must be matched from the private sector. Applications are expected to begin in September 2011.^[34]

See also[link]

• Electoral history of Michael Portillo

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Michael Gove, (1995), "Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right" ISBN 1-85702-335-8
• Michael Gove, (2000), "Michael Portillo", Fourth Estate, 448 pages, ISBN 1-84115-363-X (paperback)

External links[link]

• Official website
• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Michael Portillo
• Portillo's columns for The Sunday Times
• Guardian Unlimited Politics Ask Aristotle – Michael Portillo
• They Work For You – Michael Portillo
• The Public Whip – Michael Portillo voting record
• Harrow County Grammar School
• Michael Portillo at the Internet Movie Database

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