Cosgrave, Patrick John Francis (1941–2001), writer and political adviser, was born 28 September 1941 in Dublin, only child of Patrick John Cosgrave, cabinet-maker and builder, and Margaret Cosgrave (née FitzGerald), daughter of a warder in Mountjoy prison, who Patrick would mischievously allege had beaten up Kevin Barry (qv). His much-loved father, a convivial gambler, was initially prosperous but, being financially chaotic, ran out of money when he contracted cancer, forcing his wife to work as cleaner of the church at Dublin castle to support her family, which included motherless nieces and nephews. He died when Patrick was ten, leaving wife and son penniless and obliged to leave their roomy home for a small council house. Patrick attended St Vincent's School, Glasnevin, and – already an omnivorous reader – there conceived a lifelong aversion to the Christian Brothers’ brand of nationalism and catholic orthodoxy. A promising athlete, he was bedridden with rheumatic fever for almost a year, aged fourteen, and emerged with a weakened heart (which eventually killed him) and a set of convictions to which he remained faithful for the rest of his life. After months of reading British literature and history, and influenced particularly by John Buchan, Churchill, Disraeli, T. E. Lawrence, Sir Walter Scott, and English detective fiction, he became a romantic conservative, attached to the British empire and happy to be described as a ‘West Briton’; his future mother-in-law, Sheila Dudley Edwards, called him a ‘white blackbird’. At school (and later in Fleet Street) he was called ‘The Mekon’ after the huge-foreheaded Venusian, specially bred for intellect, who was the chief enemy of ‘Dan Dare’ in the Eagle comic's space adventures. He cut an unusual figure when he proceeded in 1960 to UCD, where he supported himself first through summer jobs canning beans in England, then through scholarships, and later through freelance work at RTÉ.
He had a notable student career as a pupil of R. Dudley Edwards (qv) and T. Desmond Williams (qv) and as part of a dynamic group that included Liam Hourican (qv), Ronan Fanning, Anthony Clare (1942–2007), and Cosgrave's girlfriend Ruth Dudley Edwards, whom he married 31 July 1965. He directed for the UCD Dramatic Society Sartre's ‘Huis clos’ and then directed and starred as T. E. Lawrence in Terence Rattigan's ‘Ross’, for which he won the Best Actor award at a national competition for universities. Auditor of both the History Society and the L&H, the college debating society, he formed with Clare a formidable debating duo which won the Irish Times trophy for student debating in two consecutive years as well as the Observer Mace competition in 1964 over every other university in Britain and Ireland; Patrick also won the individual speaker award. Pale, thin, and floppy-haired, with a neutral accent that bore no trace of his Finglas council estate, he was known for his impassive demeanour and analytical arguments, as well as for his delight in teasing nationalists. He took a first in history in his BA (1963) though only a second in his MA, but he had, however, already won a research studentship at Peterhouse, Cambridge, to write his doctorate on the foreign policy of Edward Grey under the supervision of Sir Herbert Butterfield, the regius professor of modern history.
In Cambridge he became ‘Patrick’ instead of ‘Paddy’, was active in the local conservative party, and fell under the influence of the conservative thinker and fellow of Peterhouse, Maurice Cowling. Although an agnostic, he occasionally attended Church of England services, and acquired a British passport; some in Ireland accused him of adopting a new persona, but these were only superficial additions to the character he had formulated in his teens – like Jay Gatsby he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He wanted to be a serious historian, a successful writer, and prime minister.
Already a freelance writer, Cosgrave was appointed (1968) RTÉ's London correspondent by the maverick producer Jim McGuinness – a tribute to Cosgrave's intellect and articulacy, but an unusual choice. Cosgrave loathed Ireland and despised Irish politicians other than Noel Browne (qv), to whose 1965 election campaign he had contributed financially. On Northern Ireland he was instinctively unionist, recommending privately that the way to deal with the IRA was to take out the television cameras, seal off the border, and send in the Gurkhas.
Though he tended to report as English insider rather than Irish observer, he performed well, made useful political contacts and – ever the romantic – even developed a tendresse for the nationalist MP Bernadette Devlin, about whom he made a TV film, but in late 1969 he moved to the Conservative Research Department. This initiated the most dynamic period of his life – he was for the next decade a tory insider and creator of policy. Energetic and needing little sleep, he briefed Edward Heath (then leader of the opposition) for prime minister's questions, and his output at the research department – especially on social policy – was so prolific that he had to have two secretaries. Proving his versatility, his first book, The public poetry of Robert Lowell (1970), was on literature, not politics, but typically sought to place Lowell in the classical tradition. In 1971, aged 29, he was appointed the Spectator's political editor after impressing with a series of dazzling articles, and became part of the network of heavyweight conservative journalists such as Colin Welch, Peregrine Worsthorne, and George Gale. He also became a passionate Zionist.
His early loyalty to Ted Heath evaporated over Europe. In the Spectator he led the anti-Europe conservatives against Heath's leadership, and even welcomed on to the pages anti-Europeans from the Labour party: like one of his political heroes, Enoch Powell, whose biography he wrote, Cosgrave believed in ‘principle before party’. His editorial ‘Exit the squatter’, exulting in Heath's departure in 1974, was a classic in vitriol, but his public savagery contrasted with the private kindness and generosity that won him many friends; he took on the upbringing of his wife's eight-year-old niece and helped advance friends’ careers. An early devotee of Margaret Thatcher, he expressed support for a prospective Thatcher leadership bid in October 1974, while other journalists scoffed.
In 1974 Cosgrave left the Spectator and was for a time features editor of the Telegraph magazine. After Thatcher replaced Heath in 1975, Cosgrave was rewarded by becoming special adviser and speech writer, a position he held for three years (1976–9). His devotion to Thatcher (whom he referred to as ‘the Lady’) gave him a role in the Private Eye spoof Denis Thatcher letters (‘Dear Bill’) as ‘little Cosgrave’, who poured the drinks; his hagiographical Margaret Thatcher: a tory and her party appeared in 1978. A safe seat was in prospect and he believed he would achieve high office, but this period was his zenith. Already he had developed a reputation for drunkenness, and his indiscretion and a minor stroke destroyed his chance of securing a candidacy. Thatcher was kind to him, but he had become a liability. He did not appear in her autobiography.
He worked briefly as advisor to Tiny Rowland on his newspaper group, but was fired because of a tendency to fantasise that was steadily making him unemployable. He lasted two years (1979–81) with another flamboyant tycoon, Naim Attallah, as managing editor of the new Quartet Crime. Written off by Fleet Street (vomiting over colleagues was the final straw), he had henceforward no option but to settle for the isolated, precarious existence of a freelance writer.
Cosgrave wrote fourteen books, many of them on heroes such as Churchill, Thatcher, Powell, and Lord Carrington. The academic impartiality which won him praise for his early Churchill at war (1974) turned to partisanship in his later books, but The lives of Enoch Powell (1989), his own favourite among his books, was scholarly, thoughtful, and not marred by his evident admiration for his subject, while The strange death of socialist England (1992) spotted a truth ahead of most political commentators. Three adventure thrillers owed much to his early reading of Buchan and Dornford Yates. A contributor to numerous newspapers, his talent-spotting and prescience did not desert him – in 1989 he tipped the outwardly unremarkable John Major as next tory leader. Drinking, which he never got under control, did not reduce his literary output – until late in life he got up at 5 a.m. and produced 3,000 words before breakfast – but did eventually damage the quality of his work.
Lack of control extended to his finances, which were not helped by a tendency to ignore letters from the inland revenue: in 1981, to his new wife's surprise, a newspaper broke the story of his bankruptcy while they were on honeymoon. However, what his Daily Telegraph obituary called ‘that quality of refusing to realise that something was wrong’ helped preserve Cosgrave from professional disappointments. He continued to act like a successful elder statesman, although his alcoholism, unreliable memory, and tendency to repetition isolated him. His first two marriages (his second, in 1974 to Norma Alicia Green, gave him a daughter) had ended in divorce – domestically he could be short-tempered and overbearing – but he was made content by his third wife (m. 14 February 1981), Shirley Ward, secretary to the European Democrats at the European parliament. She supported him financially and nursed him through years of uncertain health and pain, exacerbated by whiskey and chain-smoking, but borne with physical courage.
Cosgrave died at St George's hospital in south-west London on 15 September 2001, two weeks before his sixtieth birthday. The funeral was at Holy Trinity church in Clapham and he was cremated at Putney Vale crematorium.
At the height of his success, comparisons with Brendan Bracken (qv) were inevitable – both were Irish, sons of builders, left fatherless when young, and were conservative romantics, loyal to a strong tory figure. But Cosgrave burnt out early and, though academically more gifted than Bracken, lacked his discipline and entrepreneurial ability. Cosgrave is notable mainly for his meteoric rise, and remains one of history's might-have-beens.