Malcolm Wallop RIP

In the inimitable style of the British obituary, the Daily Telegraph remembers Malcolm Wallop, who represented Wyoming in the US Senate from 1977 through 1995:

[Wallop] was born on February 27 1933 in New York City, son of Oliver Wallop, the younger son of the 8th Earl of Portsmouth – the only man to serve both in the Wyoming legislature and the House of Lords. Malcolm was educated at Big Horn School and subsequently at Cate School in California, arguably the pre-eminent private boarding school on the West Coast.

His connections to Britain were reinforced when, in 1956, his sister Jean married Lord Porchester, later 7th Earl of Carnarvon and the Queen’s racing manager. In consequence, Wallop became a regular visitor to Highclere (location of the house in the television series Downton Abbey), where he enjoyed a reputation as an excellent shot. His appetite for office was whetted by watching the highly efficacious interventions of his brother-in-law, “Porchy”, in the debates of Hampshire County Council, where he sat for 24 years as an independent member.

In October 1984, after a three-week tour of Canada and the US, the Queen stayed on the Wallop family estate at Big Horn. The Brighton bomb exploded while she holidayed there, and so Canyon Ranch became the scene of the first telephone conversation between the Sovereign and Mrs Thatcher following the IRA atrocity which had nearly killed the Prime Minister.