A board member of the New Israel Fund has been appointed to the House of Lords in the Dissolution Honours list.

Sir Jeremy Beecham, the former chairman of the Local Government Association, will be joined on the red benches by another new Jewish peer, Conservative donor Simon Wolfson.

A prominent figure in both the national and local Labour Party, Sir Jeremy will join as a Labour peer. Once the chairman of the Labour Party National Executive Committee, he also serves as a councillor and spent 17 years as the leader of Newcastle City Council.

Sitting across from him will be businessman Simon Wolfson, a key donor to Prime Minister David Cameron’s leadership campaign and the chief executive of retailer Next.

The son of Margaret Thatcher’s chief of staff Lord (David) Wolfson, he reportedly donated £10,000 to the Cameron campaign as well as £50,000 to the party. He was also a co-chair of the party’s Economic Competitiveness policy group.

In the run up to the 2010 election he was one of the key business figures to speak against Labour’s proposed national insurance rise.

Despite widespread expectation he would be given a life peerage, absent from the list was Andrew Feldman, chief executive of the Conservative Party.