Worship at the Abbey

A Service of Thanksgiving for the life and work of Lord Maples of Stratford-upon-Avon

30 October 2012 at 12:00 pm

A Service of Thanksgiving for the life and work of Lord Maples of Stratford-upon-Avon was held in St Margaret’s Church on Tuesday 30th October 2012 at Noon. 

John Cradock Maples was born at Fareham, Hampshire, on 22nd April 1943 and brought up in the Wirral. He was educated at Downing College, Cambridge and at Harvard Business School and founded the law firm Maples and Calder in the Cayman Islands, which still bears his name.

Maples entered Parliament in 1983 as Conservative MP for Lewisham West. He was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Norman Lamont from 1987 to 1990. He was appointed to the junior ministerial position of Economic Secretary by Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and continued to work closely with Lamont, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, dealing with both the Bank of England and BCCI crisis. He served as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party under John Major.

After losing his job and his seat, from 1992 to 1996 he served as chairman of the lobbying firm Saatchi and Saatchi Government Communications. He was then re-elected to Parliament as MP for Stratford-upon-Avon, where he held the health, defence and foreign briefs in William Hague’s shadow cabinet.

David Cameron re-appointed Maples to deputy party chairman in November 2006, with responsibility for candidate selection.

After Maples resigned his seat, Cameron made him a life peer in the dissolution honours list of July 2010 – he took the title Lord Maples of Stratford-upon-Avon. He continued his career in the House of Lords as a member of the joint Parliamentary Finance Committee. He was working on the Financial Services Bill at the time of his death.

Lord Maples is survived by his wife, the award-winning BBC Panorama journalist Jane Corbin, whom he married in 1986, and by their son and daughter. He died of cancer, aged 69, on 9th June 2012.