Baroness Sally Oppenheimer-Barnes, Thatcher minister dies at 96

She was a committed Tory since childhood. She even burst into tears on hearing that Winston Churchill had lost the 1945 election. Lady Sally Oppenheim-Barnes, who has died aged 96, made good on her juvenile Conservative commitments and joined the party at the age of 22. But she was told that to stand any chance of selection as a candidate she had to prove her grasp of contemporary society.

She took that advice on board and for the next three years became a social worker in Hackney,helping immigrants with health issues. Social work in east London was far from familiar territory for the woman comfortably married to successful businessman, Henry Oppenheim, a Finchley property magnate. But as she grew to understand the needs of immigrants, so she later came to understand those of her constituents, and as Britain boomed in the 1960s, she also demonstrated her keen awareness of customers’ rights.

In 1958, Henry, a prominent member of Finchley Conservatives, helped select Margaret Thatcher as the party’s candidate. In 1975 Sally became the only woman to be appointed to Thatcher’s shadow cabinet. She also rose to become Minister of State for consumer affairs - a position she held between May 1979 and March 1982.

The social worker and the grocer’s daughter appeared superficially similar, both positive and assertive women, brash, blonde and power-dressed. Sally was noted for her striking wardrobe, her strawberry blonde beehive hairdo and her clattering jewellery.

But, in fact, it had not been an easy journey. Although she attracted attention at the 1966 Conservative conference with her robust call for trade union reform , she found the road to Westminster difficult.

It took five selection attempts to contest the so-called safe seat of Gloucester in 1968, but she unexpectedly defeated Labour Treasury Minister Jack Diamond at the 1970 general election by a majority of just over 1,000. She continued to represent Gloucester for the Conservatives until 1987. when Douglas French took over as Conservative MP, then lost to Tess Kingham in 1997.

Born in Dublin as Sarah Amelia Viner, the only child of Jeanette and Mark Viner, a diamond cutter descended from a long line of Sheffield based cutlers and silverware makers, the family returned to Yorkshire and she attended Sheffield High School, followed by Lowther College in North Wales. She then studied drama at Rada for three years. Acting may have briefly superseded her political ambitions, but her marriage to Henry Oppenheim in 1949 put that firmly on the back burner. Instead, she raised her family and waited for her political moment. She changed her name to Sally in 1968.

As inflation rose in the 1970s, Sally upheld the rights of the housewife, once remonstrating with a shopkeeper who put up the price of detergent by a penny. In office she saw her role as the champion of the consumer and the small shopkeeper and she succeeded in delaying the replacement of imperial measures by metric.

It did not take her long to make her views on Europe known. She soon became one of the few Tory MPs to vote against European membership. But her forthright views also won her enemies. She drew death threats from Friends of the Angry Brigade when speaking up for the Heath government’s Industrial Relations Bill, and aroused controversy when she tried to make doctors inform teenage girls’ parents when putting them on the Pill. She voted with Labour to secure tougher animal welfare laws, and in 1972 she called for dangerous cleaning products to carry warning labels. Based on her campaign, she later chaired the Conservative backbench consumer protection committee

She was also quick to advocate for competition in the marketplace, and in the face of Labour’s newly created Department of Prices and Consumer Protection, Edward Heath appointed her as a junior spokesperson in opposition after the October, 1974 election. One year later she joined Thatcher’s shadow cabinet.

When Thatcher came to power in 1979, she appointed the popular Oppenheim-Barnes consumer affairs minister in her first government. The new minister went to work with a vengeance. She scrapped the Price Commission which she had damned during the election as a “Mafia with Star Chamber powers,” and replaced it with the Office of Fair Trading; she called for the scrapping of price controls and the Metrication Board. She pioneered the Competition Bill, reinforcing the Office of Fair Trading and the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. She rejected several proposed EEC consumer protection measures as irrelevant to Britain.

She went on to demand the labelling of all sealskin articles, ordered a ban on the sale of foam-filled children’s furniture, and controversially disclosed the merger of the London Evening News with the Evening Standard before management and unions had been notified. She campaigned for consumer rights to be included in the school curriculum

At every turn she had to run the gauntlet of Opposition broadsides at her wealthy background; their taunts accused her of looking the millionaire’s wife she clearly was and in 1965 she would elicit scant sympathy when she had a £35,000 necklace stolen, or when she sold her house in The Bishop’s Avenue, Hampstead, for £600,000, an incredible sum at the time.

Perhaps as a Tory it was easier to make few bones about her wealth, but for Oppenheim-Barnes, it was a no-brainer. She had no qualms about telling the Daily Express – “There’s a lot more to me than a rich bitch. I am known as a nagger and I’m very tenacious.”

And on feminism, like Thatcher she deplored its more aggressive manifestations, but saw no bar to women achieving their goals.

In 1968, on the 50th anniversary commemoration of women’s votes, she faced aggression by angry feminists. She rebuffed them by asserting that the suffragettes were noted for dignity and had won universal respect for their courage: “I wish the Woman’s Lib movement today always conducted itself with the same dignity,” she declared.

She told the Commons that revolutionaries like Rousseau, Robespierre, Marx and Lenin had “a poor record in improving the status of women”. Henry died in 1980 and she stood down as a minister two years later.At the time she was a director and major shareholder of a family company with an extensive property portfolio and business interests. In 1983 her son Phillip joined her on the back benches as MP for Amber Valley.The following year she married John Barnes, whom she had met when she opened his firm’s missile components factory.

Sally Oppenheim-Barnes left the Commons at the 1987 election, and that August was appointed to chair the NCC, whose role she regarded as protecting the consumer by enforcing competition rather than through regulation. She was also a vice-president of the National Union of Townswomen’s Guilds. and chair of the National Waterways Museum.

In February, 1989 she was made a life peer with the title Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes of Gloucester in the County of Gloucestershire.

Sally Oppenheim-Barnes is survived by her second husband, and by her son and two daughters from her first marriage.

Sally Oppenheim-Barnes: born July 26, 1928. Died January 1, 2025