Mary Warnock embodied the worst, not the best, of Britain’s ruling class before Mrs Thatcher

The philosopher Lady Warnock died on Thursday aged 94. She was Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge and chaired the committee that decided that embryos could be experimented on up to the age of fourteen days. Enoch Powell introduced a bill that failed to make such experiments illegal. She complained that Enoch was 

“so much in the dirty tricks department. The moment he called his bill ‘The Protection of the Unborn Child Bill’, I knew I had no respect for him whatsoever.”

As headmistress of Oxford High School from 1966 to 1972, Warnock said that when 16-year-old girls got pregnant, she would encourage them to have an abortion and come back to do their O levels. She was for forty years an ardent defender of abortion and later on of assisted dying. 

She was the embodiment of the phrase 'the great and the good'.

Babies, she said, should be screened at birth and disabled ones killed.

“As few as 30 years ago … the doctor and midwife together, often without needing to exchange a word, simply saw to it that the baby did not survive and told the parents it was stillborn.”

Her Guardian obituary says:

"While studying classics after obtaining a scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford she was sexually harassed by one of her teachers, Eduard Fraenkel, but she brusquely dubbed this a price worth paying for his inspirational teaching."

She admitted that she was never “a real blood-and-bones philosopher” or “much good” at the subject and wrote her books principally for money.

She was an Anglican atheist who said she 'probably' did not believe in God but thought 'the religious imagination' was valuable. 

She was a Tory at fifteen, became left-wing during and after the war, then conservative again and then stopped being a conservative out of loathing of Margaret Thatcher but described herself as a natural Tory. 

She loved Trollope but popularised the ideas of Sartre. It is like a novel by Anthony Powell.

The one thing that I remember about her was that she said of Margaret Thatcher

“Watching her choose clothes at Marks and Spencer, there was something quite obscene about it.” 

Mary Warnock said that Mrs Thatcher, who knighted and then ennobled her,

“epitomised the worst of the lower middle class”.

Her clothes and hair were

“packaged in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low”.

She felt 

“a kind of rage”

whenever she thought about Mrs Thatcher’s

“odious suburban gentility”.

Andrew Brown, a left-wing atheist and a writer I love but never agree with, said

"Mary Warnock embodied the best of Britain’s ruling class before Thatcher."

Andrew Brown admires her attitude towards assisted dying. 

She favoured it, but not so much on grounds of individual freedom as on a fairly ruthless assessment of the use of old people. She would rather pass on money to her children, she said, than have it wasted on her decrepitude.

Looking back thirty or forty years later, I think she makes Margaret Thatcher look very good but it was Conservative governments that gave Lady Warnock power. 

She was typical of a certain type of female busybody who infest quangos, committees and increasingly Parliament in Britain. Theresa May and Amber Rudd resemble her, except that they are much less clever.

The Telegraph always has the best obituaries, not the first but second drafts of history. Her Telegraph obituary is a wonderful one, a Swiftian, scathingly funny and derisive character assassination that contains good insights into her times. Read the whole thing. 

'She adhered to two basic principles: first, that law and morality can only be determined by their likely consequence, since there are no objective moral principles on which everyone can agree (“consequentialism”). Second, that those who believe in the existence of such principles must be excluded from the decision-making process.


“It really would be entirely unproductive if one had the most fanatical or the most dogmatic persons who really would be wasting the committee’s time,” she said, “because you’d know they weren’t going to change or listen to the arguments.” When a liberal Catholic moral philosopher was proposed as a member of the embryology committee she vetoed his appointment, though she later claimed that this was because he was a “creep” and a “horror”, not because of his moral views.'

It has a very Telegraphian gem later on.

In the early 1990s she suggested that a statutory body be set up to rule out frivolous applications for genetic testing for selecting the sex of a child. When asked to define a non-frivolous application she replied: “I don’t think a hereditary peerage is a frivolous thing” and suggested that if the 16th Duke of Norfolk, who died in 1975 leaving four daughters, had wanted a son, “he could have fixed it”.