Tony Whittaker obituary

When the Coventry solicitor Tony Whittaker was handed a copy of Playboy magazine by his wife, Lesley, in a Warwickshire pub in the summer of 1972, he could not have envisaged that it would lead to the couple co-founding one the world’s first Green parties. The magazine had an interview with the US biologist Paul R Ehrlich, who predicted famine and environmental collapse if governments ignored nature, and population continued to grow unchecked.

For the Whittakers and their drinking friends in the Bridge Inn at Napton, the local businessman Michael Benfield and his colleague and later wife, Freda Sanders, the conversation was the catalyst to form a new kind of party to challenge the UK political establishment and reflect mounting awareness of global environmental limits. The “Gang of Four”, as they became known, called a public meeting in the Whittakers’ legal offices and the 43 people who turned up in February 1973 founded People, which was renamed the Ecology party at its second national conference in 1975, and then the Green party in 1984.

Tony Whittaker, who has died aged 83, was the party’s first chair, travelling thousands of miles up and down Britain to set up branches. After a year there were more than 40 groups, and in the general elections in February and October 1974, People fielded candidates for the first time, with Tony also acting as political agent to Lesley.

Previously a Conservative councillor in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, Whittaker made an unlikely 1970s radical, coming from a caring, social justice-oriented political background. But inspired by Edward Goldsmith’s A Blueprint for Survival, which had been signed by more than 30 leading scientists including Sir Julian Huxley, Sir Frank Fraser Darling and Sir Peter Scott, he steered the new party towards adopting economics, employment, defence, energy and social policies that were rooted in the need for sustainability and which remain core to the party 45 years later.

Clive Lord, who joined the embryonic party after hearing Whittaker talk months after its formation, said Tony embraced the idea of radically restructuring society and drastically redistributing wealth via a basic income. “As a well-heeled solicitor, he would have paid far more in tax than the basic income was worth to him. He realised it was fairer than the existing system, but above all it would enable whole societies to live within ecological limits. That aspiration was the Green party’s original raison d’etre. To Tony, redistribution, even drastic redistribution, was a price well worth paying to secure a sustainable future.”

Tony was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, the only son of Arthur Whittaker, deputy chair and general manager of Jaguar cars, and his wife, Mary (also born with the name of Whittaker). As a child he watched Coventry burn in the blitz during the second world war. He attended Warwick school, going on to study law at Birmingham University. After graduation, he served for two years in the RAF for his national service.

In 1957 he married Pat Evans and they moved to Kenilworth, where their three daughters, Lucy, Sally and Sarah, were born. Tony and Pat divorced, and in 1971 Tony married Lesley Hill, another solicitor. They set up a new legal firm in Coventry. Four years later they sold the practice, moving to Exmoor in Devon to become self-sufficient smallholder farmers. Their son, Michael, died soon after his birth in 1977. In 1979 Charlotte was born.

That year Tony stood as the Ecology party candidate against the former Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe, who was about to face trial for conspiracy to murder a former friend, Norman Scott. Thorpe’s notoriety attracted the national press which, intrigued by the radical Ecology party candidate, gave Whittaker and the young organisation unexpected but welcome publicity. Thorpe lost his seat to the Tories, with Whittaker polling only 729 votes, but the winner by far was the Ecology party.

After the events of 1979, Tony withdrew from Green politics and retreated to continue living the good life in the south-west, sailing his yacht round the Channel. Lesley, meanwhile, switched to Liberal Democrat politics, becoming a local councillor and an agent in European elections. For some years Tony managed the post office in Hennock, on the south-east edge of Dartmoor, for the owner of its pub, who made a room available, and he wrote many computer programs based on navigation and personal taxation.

Lesley and Charlotte survive him, as do Lucy, Sally and Sarah.