PERSONAL POST: Alaric Bamping, 12th April 1954 to 30th December 2025

I recently spoke at the funeral of an old friend – someone I often disagreed with, but who I liked and admired very much

Back in the mid-1990s, I worked for The Financial Times – as a Westminster-based Political Correspondent. It was a heady time - and not just because I was in my twenties and life was full of endless possibilities.

It was also a period of great change in British politics and society more generally, with John Major’s rather tired Conservative government running on empty – and the 1997 general election marking the coming of age of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” movement and the end of eighteen years of Tory rule.

New Labour was a political force to be reckoned with – Blair went on to win three successive general elections, of course – but somewhat of a cultural phenomenon too. One person at the heart of that culture – not just politically astute but also supremely well-connected – was the businesswoman, writer and broadcaster Julia Hobsbawn.

Julia grew up in North London, at the heart of a proud and strong Jewish community. Her father was the historian Professor Eric Hobsbawn – who rose to become President of Birkbeck College, University of London.

Julia began her career in publishing, and also worked as a television current affairs researcher, before moving to political fundraising ahead of the Labour Party 1992 General Election. In 1993, she founded the public relations firm Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications with her friend Sarah Macaulay, who later married Gordon Brown.

I never had much in common with Julia politically, but we became good friends during the late 1990s. I also got to know her partner, Alaric, and was later delighted to attend their wedding. Since then, over many years, Julia has invited me to numerous receptions and parties at her home and elsewhere – and I’d often end up talking to Alaric. Again, we seemed to have little in common politically - Alaric had been a leftwing student firebrand – and yet I always enjoyed chatting to him.

At the back end of last year, Julia and her family suffered a shocking double-blow. Not only did her beloved elderly mother pass away, but the very same night, she also lost her husband. Alaric had been driving to hospital to be with his wife, as she said goodbye to her mother. But, en route, he suffered a heart attack and also died.

After I heard Julia’s ghastly news, I got in touch to send my condolences. I was honoured when Julia asked me to say a few words about Alaric’s politics at his funeral.

To mark Valentine’s Day last weekend, Julia wrote a typically moving Substack post – “he wasn’t a Valentine’s kind of a guy - but he was my Valentine” – describing how she was “cycling through the stages of grief”.

And, with Julia’s permission, I have posted my funeral oration for Alaric below – along with a few photos.

RIP Alaric Bamping, 12th April 1954 to 30th December 2025

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FUNERAL ORATION – FOR ALARIC BAMPING

Monday 26th January

West Chapel, Golders Green Crematorium, London

“Highly intelligent, courageous, insightful. Prepared, if needs be, to go against the grain, but always open-minded and funny - he was the very opposite of a caricature Leftie”.

When news of Alaric’s tragic death became public, deep in the House of Lords, one of his friends put pen to paper.

The words I just read are those of Baroness Claire Fox, who is with us today, from a beautiful hand-written letter of condolence she sent to Julia, which I quote with Claire’s kind permission.

“He was principled and firm,” Claire wrote. “Brave – and different. Whip-smart and, above all, fiercely independent – he had more backbone and flair than so many of those flashy types who dominate politics”.

Back in the late 70s and into the 80s, Alaric Bamping was, of course, a proud member of the Socialist Workers’ Party and a dominant figure in student politics at what was then the Polytechnic of Central London. He was President of the Union twice and student newspaper editor, a leftwing firebrand.

When a young Julia Hobsbawn turned up at PCL, it was, she has told me, love at first sight. “He had organised and was leading an occupation of the Regent’s Street building, a four-day sit-in” she recalls. “As a keen first year, I was mesmerised and simply had to join. During the occupation, I tried to get his attention by frantically cleaning the kitchen,” says Julia.

I’m not suggesting, when it came to domestic chores, that was the pattern of their marriage...

I got to know Alaric in the late 90s and early 2000s, ahead of his and Julia’s wedding – which I was delighted to attend. Back then, I was a Financial Times Political Correspondent, before covering economics on Channel 4 News.

I knew straight away when I met him, as Claire Fox has said, that I was dealing with someone who wasn’t just clever, but incredibly thoughtful. Alaric wasn’t on the front line of reporting or commentary, but he asked superbly well-informed questions, offering original ideas and insights of his own. It was as if he could see around corners, always questioning consensus views.

Hearing I had been a Moscow correspondent, and reported from Ukraine and Central Asia, Alaric and I would, over many years, talk frequently about the latest news from various parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. His ethnic origins interested him – and mattered to him – enormously. He was intensely proud of his Jewish roots and culture. But that didn’t stop him, being Alaric, from questioning the latest actions of Israel.

That was Alaric all over – always challenging comfortable assertions, never shying away from social awkwardness if he felt something was important and needed to be said.

He was IN the political and media class, but somehow never quite allowed himself to be OF it. He was, above all, intensely interested in, and I would say very highly attuned to, the ebbs and flows of public opinion – the views of the broader electorate, the mood and anxieties of the country as a whole.

There have been many times over the years when I’ve turned up at Julia’s wonderful soirees – generally the sole Telegraph columnist in the room, it must be said – and Alaric and I would end up chatting in the corner, swapping “problematic” opinions, thinking semi-subversive thoughts.

One of his common themes was that he felt too many long-established journalists and politicians often missed the point. “Well-educated people need to think more broadly,” he once told me. “Far too many of us dismiss and even patronise legitimate points of view that are entirely understandable and very widely held”.

This aspect of Alaric’s personality, in some senses of his very soul, came to the fore when he surprised and even disappointed some of his oldest friends by standing for the Brexit party in 2019. His history as a PCL student activist, and his partnership with Julia, meant that was controversial – and he took considerable public flack.

Brexit was and remains controversial, of course – the result and fall out from the 2016 referendum upended numerous political tribes and wrecked many marriages. Yet Alaric and Julia navigated all that beautifully. Of course they did – because theirs was and is a truly beautiful love story, one based on two-way tolerance, deep affection and life-long respect.

Julia was genuinely proud when Alaric was selected to stand for the Brexit party in Dartford, proud of the public interest in his candidature and of the respect modern-day political strategists had – and rightly so – for Alaric’s insights and proven campaigning expertise.

And it reflects extremely well on Julia that she also shared Alaric’s personal disappointment when he was stood down as a candidate in Dartford, a victim of the Brexit party’s eve-of-poll deal with the Tories.

Alaric was beguiled by, and defended the importance always, of grass-roots politics, of the power of protest and public opinion, of the need for the will of the electorate to steer and determine our national path.

In the downstairs hallway of the house on Cheverton Road, where Julia and Alaric so lovingly raised their kids, there’s a large, framed picture, a sketch by Henry Harris – The Gathering of the Unions on Newhall Hill in Birmingham, May 1832 – given to Alaric by Julia’s late father, the distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm.

That rally attracted around 200,000 people – at the time, far more than the entire population of Birmingham. It was a massive public protest – as organised labour pushed for the passing of the Great Reform Bill, a partial extension of the voting franchise.

The bill was defeated in the Lords the same evening of that famous May 1832 protest, causing then Prime Minister Earl Grey to resign.

But after further agitation and demonstration – much of it bitterly criticised and dismissed as “polarising and divisive”, of course, by then contemporary well-heeled, bien pensant opinion-formers writing for posh newspapers – the Great Reform Act was finally passed the following month, in June 1832.

And so, a little more power flowed away from the rich and already influential, flowed downwards – extending the vote to some middle-class men and tackling the so-called “rotten boroughs”.

Thus, the UK continued its journey, bit by bit, with determined and often awkward campaigners pushing all the time, from feudal monarchy to modern representative democracy – finally achieving universal suffrage, the vote for all adult men and woman, almost a century later, only in 1928.

That Gathering of the Unions picture in Julia’s hallway was and is apt, as Alaric’s distinguished father-in-law knew only too well. Because Alaric understood to his fingertips a stark political reality – that the powerful and privileged don’t give up their power lightly or easily. They cling to it, and employ every political and rhetorical trick in the book to dismiss those who dare to challenge.

The political process is – and sometimes even should be – difficult and messy, as Alaric knew well, as we discussed over the last quarter of a century.

And that means identifying and tackling difficult, vexed issues, sometimes distressing those you love, often speaking uncomfortable truths.

Alaric Bamping, as a grass roots practitioner and an observer of penetrating insight, cared deeply about politics – not just for the drama, the who’s up and who’s down, the showbiz for ugly people.

He cared deeply because economic and political debate ultimately impacts government policies – which in turn then impact tens of millions of lives and livelihoods.

“He was one of my favourite people, wrote Claire Fox to Julia, “And I will miss him”.

Won’t we all.

“And Oh the irony,” wrote the Baroness, “of one old Revolutionary Trot writing about another old Revolutionary Trot, singing his praises, on House of Lords note paper!”

It was an irony that dear Alaric – with his trademark mercurial wit and charm – would so obviously relish.

Liam Halligan