Geoffrey Johnson-Smith

Who was Geoffrey Johnson-Smith?

Sir Geoffrey Johnson-Smith, PC, DL was a Scottish Conservative politician in the United Kingdom. He was a Member of Parliament from 1959 to 2001, with only a brief interruption in the 1960s.

The son of an electrical engineer, he was always proud of his birth city, Glasgow. He joined the Royal Artillery straight from Charterhouse School in 1942 and after the war was demobilised as a captain.

At Lincoln College, Oxford, he read PPE. Contemporaries remember him as Oxford’s best-dressed socialist, though he always insisted he never joined the Labour Party. In his final year he and Robin Day took part in a debating tour of United States run by the English-Speaking Union. From Oxford he joined the British Information Services, serving in San Francisco, where he met his wife, Jeanne, an American doctor whom he married in 1951.

He was later a presenter of the BBC political programme Tonight in the late 1950s.

Shortly before the 1959 general election, Cliff Michelmore, Tonight’s presenter, had a hernia operation and Johnson-Smith was promoted to co-host the show for six weeks. His profile was thus at its highest when the election was called, and on 8 October 1959 he ousted the Labour member for Holborn and St Pancras South Lena Jeger, by 656 votes.