By James R. Hagerty 

Rodney Leach, an Oxford-educated merchant banker, helped steer Britain away from adopting the euro and then became a rare voice of nuance in the debate on whether to remain in the European Union.

Britons narrowly voted Thursday to quit the EU. Mr. Leach had argued that Britain could "continue to be successful either inside or outside the EU" and accused both sides of "adversarial claptrap," exaggerating the consequences. Privately, he suggested he would vote to leave.

Mr. Leach, a member of the House of Lords and director of Jardine Matheson Holdings Ltd., died June 12 at age 82. He had suffered a stroke in April while presiding over a debate on the EU referendum.

"He was instrumental in changing our relationship with the EU," said Martin Jacomb, a former chairman of the British life insurer Prudential PLC.

Mr. Leach delved into the minutiae of European treaties at the urging of his second wife, Jessica Douglas-Home, the widow of Charles Douglas-Home, who was editor of the Times of London. Mr. Leach concluded that the EU was usurping democratic control in its member states and that the unified currency wouldn't work. "The Italians will want to borrow Italian amounts of money at German interest rates," he said at a debate in 1999.

Mr. Leach was chairman of a group called Business for Sterling that campaigned against British adoption of the euro. Eventually, the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Tony Blair backed away from that idea.

Mr. Leach wasn't reflexively against close cooperation with Europe but sought more of a neighborly alliance rather than what he termed a "bureaucratic oligarchy." In 2005, he set up Open Europe, a think tank that studies EU issues. The organization's moderate findings were cited by people on both sides of the recent debate on whether to quit the union.

"He had read the European treaties," said Tara Douglas-Home, a stepson. "He knew the details." Mr. Douglas-Home said his stepfather was effective partly because of his rare ability to distill complex matters into clear language.

Mr. Leach struggled with the question of how to vote in the referendum, family members said, but finally confided an inclination to leave the EU. "We aren't ever going to sacrifice our democracy, and the EU cannot ever develop a democracy," he wrote in an email leaked to the British press. "So it has to be exit, painful though that may temporarily be."

Charles Guy Rodney Leach was born on June 1, 1934, in Dublin. At Balliol College in Oxford, he won composition prizes in Greek and Latin. During the Hungarian uprising of 1956, he organized a relief fund for refugees. After giving up a budding career as an Oxford don, he crossed the Atlantic to work for Greenshields Inc., an investment firm in Montreal.

Returning to London, he joined the merchant bank N.M. Rothschild & Sons and later worked for the Swiss banking empire headed by Edmond Safra, a billionaire financier born in Lebanon.

Jardine Matheson, an Asian conglomerate founded in 1832 by the Keswick family of Scotland, recruited him in the early 1980s. He gradually assumed a major role in strategy for Jardine, whose holdings include real estate, retailing and the Mandarin Oriental hotels. Mr. Leach helped devise measures to protect Jardine from takeovers and move its legal domicile to Bermuda from Hong Kong.

When debates over Europe called him away from Jardine's London offices, he sometimes quipped to colleagues, "I'm off to save the nation," according to the Times of London.

He found time to write a 286-book, "Europe: A Concise Encyclopedia of the European Union."

In 2006, Mr. Leach was appointed a life peer and, as Lord Leach of Fairford, joined the House of Lords.

He enjoyed walking in his London neighborhood of Holland Park and in the countryside. His other interests included bridge, chess and tennis. He and his wife sometimes played doubles with the historian Antonia Fraser and the playwright Harold Pinter.

Mr. Leach's marriage to his first wife, Felicity Ballantyne, ended in divorce. His survivors include their five children, his second wife and two stepsons.

Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 24, 2016 12:17 ET (16:17 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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