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I am still reeling a bit from the shock. For the second time in almost exactly a month, we’ve lost a liberal legend. Last month it was Derek Barrie. A short while ago, Lib Dem Lords Leader Dick Newby posted the sad news that Tony Greaves had died very suddenly this morning.

We are so sad to tell you that our very own Tony Greaves died earlier today. Whilst we are shocked at the suddenness of it, we remember a real Liberal hero whose contribution to local and national politics over many decades has been massive. Salutes, Tony – you will be missed. pic.twitter.com/ATsAHz3wVc

— Lib Dem Lords (@LibDemLords) March 23, 2021

Tony was a legend who held this party together through its dark days in the 60s and 70s. He moved the motion in 1970 which committed the Liberals to community politics, which led to us having such a strong local government foundation and surviving long enough to form the Alliance and then the Liberal Democrats – though he had a few words to say about that process. He wrote a book, Merger: the inside story, with Rachael Pitchford in 1989, which was reviewed here by the Journal of Liberal History.

He went to the Lords in 2000 and was in fine form there only last week, speaking on everything from the Coronavirus Regulations to his last, withering, contribution, on the Heather and Grass etc Burning (England) Regulations 2021. He was unimpressed and, as usual, didn’t hold back.

My Lords, where I live, we are surrounded by moors. I would describe them as peat moors; a lot of them are heather moors and a lot are grass moors. Every year, there are fires on them. Some of them are managed fires on the grouse-shooting estates. Others are unmanaged fires caused by people who accidentally drop cigarette ends, or whatever, or have barbeques. It is not quite central to this statutory instrument, but I have asked questions of the Government previously about banning people from having barbeques on open country of this kind. The answer I get is that it is up to local authorities. The problem is that many of these moors are, by definition, the places where local authority boundaries are drawn, because they are up on the hills and the tops between the valleys, and getting local authorities together to organise jointly on this is not easy. I will just make that point.

The Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments has written a pretty damning report on the SI that has been presented. I think it is another example of how regrettable it is, with the way that parliamentary business is being organised at the moment, that there has not been the opportunity or the time available for the Government and the Joint Committee to discuss it and negotiate properly in the way in which it always happened in the past. We are told by the Government that they do not agree with it; the department says that it does not agree with it. That is not satisfactory—they should be having a discussion, getting together and sorting it out before it comes here. It is very unsatisfactory for us to have a statutory instrument where the JCSI is basically saying, “Don’t pass it”.

He was not known for his subtlety. Every so often, he would email me in no uncertain terms telling me where I or Lib Dem Voice had gone wrong. I would respond in equally robust terms. In fact, the last thing I said to him was “Bloody cheek…..” when he complained about the all member email I’d written about phone canvassing last month. But after those robust exchanges came the good chats. I will miss those emails more than I could imagine.