Page 764 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

Key lost his job in July 1994. He was felt to have promoted MacGregor’s motorway “cones hotline”
too enthusiastically, but had also reputedly told Major he would resign if not promoted.

After a brief spell on the Health Select Committee, he was appointed to the Defence Committee,
serving from 1995 to 1997, and again between 2005 and 2010.

Re-elected comfortably in 1997 as colleagues around him lost their seats, Key was appointed a
front-bench defence spokesman by William Hague. He pressed for a new inquiry into the Chinook
crash on the Mull of Kintyre (the pilots were eventually cleared of negligence); complained that a
constituent, an adulterous army officer, was being “tried twice for the same crime”; and insisted
that emissions from experiments at Porton Down had been “harmless organisms”.

In 2001 Iain Duncan Smith made Key shadow minister for Science and Energy, and a year later for
International Development. He left the front bench in 2003, and in 2004-05 chaired the Select
Committee on Information.

Key was selected to stand again at the 2010 election but decided to retire, telling constituency
workers the osteoarthritis which had forced him to have a spinal operation three years before
meant his health was bound to get worse. “It would be unfair to Salisbury, unfair to the
Conservative Party and unfair to my family to stand again, knowing the risk I would be taking.”

He was a member of the General Synod of the Church of England from 2005 to 2015. He chaired
the governors of Salisbury Cathedral School, was a lay canon of the cathedral, and chaired its
Magna Carta 2015 Project. He was also a dedicated choral singer, from 1975 a tenor with the
Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

He was founder chairman of the Alice Trust for Autistic Children, chairman of Wessex Archaeology
from 2011 to 2013, a trustee of the Trussell Trust, and a freeman of the City of Salisbury.

Robert Key married Susan Irvine in 1968. They had two sons (one of whom lived only a few days)
and two daughters.

Robert Key, born April 22 1945, died February 6 2023