Philip Goodhart

Sir Philip Carter Goodhart (3 November 1925 – 5 July 2015) was a British Conservative politician, the son of Arthur Lehman Goodhart.

Goodhart attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut.

He contested Consett in 1950 whilst still a student at Trinity College, Cambridge.

In 1950, he married Valerie Forbes Winant, niece of John Gilbert Winant; they had seven children: Arthur, Sarah, David, Rachel, Harriet, Rebecca and Daniel.

The couple lived in Whitebarn, Youlbury Woods, Oxford.

He was elected Member of Parliament for Beckenham at a 1957 by-election, and served until his retirement in 1992.

One of the unsuccessful candidates for the nomination in 1957 was the young Margaret Thatcher.

In his book Referendum (1971), Goodhart argued that the EEC membership referendum, then under discussion in the context of the United Kingdom (UK) joining the European Economic Community (EEC), could in fact serve to entrench constitutional safeguards that the UK lacked, quoting Arthur Balfour's contribution to the debate on the Parliament Bill (later the Parliament Act 1911): "In the referendum lies our hope of getting the sort of constitutional security which every other country but our own enjoys ..."

(Referendum, ).

He wrote the definitive account of the 1975 referendum campaign, Full-hearted Consent (1975), and also The 1922: The Story of the 1922 Committee (1973).

He was a junior Northern Ireland minister (1979–1981) and a junior defence minister (1981).

He was a member of the Founding Council of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford.

Goodhart died in 2015, aged 89.

One of his children is David Goodhart, director of the Demos thinktank and journalist for the Prospect magazine.