I went to the memorial service for Lord Cormack this morning, held, very appropriately, at St. Margaret, Westminster, where he was a long-standing church warden, devoted as he was to the church of England, as to parliament.

I knew him through the All-Party Arts and Heritage group which had been established by Cormack and arranged visits for parliamentarans, mostly members of the House of Lords and their wives, to museum exhibitions, establishing a network of informal contacts.  Through this, we became friends.  In fact, not so long before he died, I consulted him about the fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, sitting on the terrace of the House of Lords which was otherwise empty because of COVID.  He was good at working behind-the-scenes, one of the foot soldiers of parliament, rather than a big player, partly because he was determinedly independent-minded, voting against his own party when he thought it was in the wrong, as, for example, in the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

He failed to help us save the Bell Foundry, but he was one of the key figures in the 1970s in the establishment of the National Heritage Memorial Fund.  Indeed, it could even have been his idea.

A force for good.  RIP.