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McDonald loved freshwater swimmingAndrew McDonald received little grat-
itude for sorting out the scandal that
allowed MPs to claim for a floating
duck-house and sacks of manure on
their expenses.
After becoming chief executive of the
Independent Parliamentary Standards
Authority (Ipsa) in 2009 with a remit to
clean up the system, McDonald, a
career civil servant, faced what he
called “unrelenting hostility” from poli-
ticians and serious questioning from a
media that had exposed the outrage
and demanded action to stop it.
Helped by a team of “top-class staff”
— McDonald in a lecture in Australia
identified with the maxim that “the best
and the brightest tend to go where the
gunfire is” — he ended the cosy regime
under which MPs effectively self-
policed their claims and put in a new,
transparent system. He believed that a
factor in creating parliament’s biggest
crisis was that the leaderships of the
main parties had kept MPs’ salaries low
for fear of upsetting the voters but sent
out an implicit message that they
should compensate for this through
their expenses. In a blog for Ipsa he said
that until 2009 there was “whispered
encouragement” that MPs could top up
their salary through allowances.
In the immediate aftermath of the ex-
penses revelations in 2009 contrite MPs
enthusiastically endorsed Ipsa’s pro-
posed new rules. Some time after the
2010 election, however, backbenchers
started criticising the new system and
Ipsa itself. Party leaders, who had previ-
ously been keen on the shake-up, were
unwilling to rein them in. And when Ipsa
recommended a £6,300 pay rise for MPs
to put the whole shambolic apparatus on
a better footing, many nervous politi-
an extent, “they’d worked out that you
had to buy a Ford Mondeo 2.2 litre Es-
tate if you wanted to get the absolutely
best deal on fuel allowances.”
What was not generally known was
that McDonald was carrying out one of
the most exacting tasks imaginable for
a senior civil servant while suffering
from two serious diseases. In 2007 he
had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s
and in 2010 with prostate cancer. In
2013 he was told that it was incurable
and as a result stepped down from Ipsa.
He became a passionate advocate for
talking openly about illness and disabil-
ity in the workplace and explained in an
interview with The Observer that when
he was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s,
he wanted to be open with his team —
he was chief executive of the skills
council for central government — but
two of his colleagues advised him not to
“because you will be labelled as a dis-
abled civil servant and it will limit your
career chances thereafter”.
At Ipsa he instigated a series oflunchtime talks where employees, him-
self included, could talk about disability
or illness.
“It has helped me to understand intu-
itively that a diverse workforce is more
likely to be an effective workforce,” he
said. “I understood that intellectually
before but now I recognise much more
immediately that if people come to the
table with a diversity of experience,
they are more likely to make better
decisions.”
The blow to his career only appeared
to reinforce his single-minded determi-
nation to make a difference elsewhere.
He became a trustee of the Cure Par-
kinson’s Trust and, between 2014 and
2019, served as chairman of Scope, the
national disability charity.
As chairman of Chapter Two, the
patient advocacy group, he focused on
improving how healthcare profession-
als communicated with their patients
and wrote a report based on his own
experiences called A Long and Winding
Road for the Marie Curie charity.
After being interviewed on Toda y on
BBC Radio 4 four years ago, he was con-
tacted by Sir Simon Stevens, then chief
executive of the NHS, who agreed to
establish a study into improving patient
experience. This summer it recom-
mended funding a “train-the-trainers”
package to enable staff to converse
more effectively with those in end-of-
life care.
As McDonald’s health declined so his
determination to complete projects
increased. He was frustrated that his
condition meant he was no longer able
to pursue his passion of freshwater
swimming but in the past nine months,
despite pain and an inability to walk, his
book on constitutional reform andnational identity was published and he
completed manuscripts for two more.
Born in Barking, Essex, to Eileen (née
Sharkey), a former nurse, and Albert
McDonald, a civil servant, Andrew was
the youngest of five children. Growing
up in Hornchurch, he attended Emer-
son Park school and won a place at St
John’s College, Oxford, to read modern
history. After studying for a PhD at
Bristol, he followed his father into the
Public Record Office, where he spent
the first half of his distinguished 28-
year career in the civil service.
McDonald moved to Whitehall in
2000, serving as tribunals reform di-
rector and acting chief executive of the
public guardianship office in the Lord
Chancellor’s Department before being
appointed as the first constitution
director in the Department for Consti-
tutional Affairs (DCA) in 2003. In this
role he played a leading part in imple-
menting freedom of information legis-
lation and was later deployed as a
senior adviser to Sir Hayden Phillips’s
review of political party funding.
In 1992 he married Louise London;
they divorced in 2017 but remained
close friends. He is survived by their
daughter, Juliet, who works in market-
ing analytics.
An avid sports fan, McDonald was
able to spend a day watching cricket at
Lord’s (he was an MCC member) and
then see his beloved Spurs lose at Ar-
senal in the north London derby in the
final weeks of his life.Andrew McDonald, former head of Ipsa,
was born on June 27, 1962. He died of
complications from Parkinson’s disease
and prostate cancer on October 28, 2021,
aged 59and Errol Flynn but had not enjoyed it.
“I had no friends, except for my brother,
and I never did what I wanted to do. I
had one vacation in nine years.”
His childhood mood was perhaps not
helped by a practical joke Flynn played
on him when he was 13 and was acting
the title role in an adaptation of Rud-
yard Kipling’s Kim. During a scene shot
in a tent on location in India, Flynn was
meant to hand Stockwell a bowl of food.
Instead, on a bet with the crew, he
handed the boy a plate “piled high with
fresh camel dung, still steaming”.
When his seven-year contract with
MGM expired in 1950, he was delight-
ed. “I did everything, just to get out ofit,” he said. After a hiatus, he returned to
Hollywood and appeared with Orson
Welles in Compulsion (1959) and with
Katharine Hepburn in Long Day’s Jour-
ney Into Night (1962). When Hepburn
objected to him turning up on set each
day with a bottle of vodka, he told her
that it was because he was “cold”. She
bought him a coat and left it in his
dressing room. He won best actor
awards at Cannes for both films.
Moving to Topanga Canyon in the
mid-1960s, where fellow residents in-
cluded Neil Young and Jim Morrison,
Stockwell tuned in, turned on and
dropped out for a second time. One
night while stoned he symbolicallycians encouraged by Downing Street
declined to take it, some telling Ipsa to
“stick” the increase.
Given such a short timetable to make
the necessary changes, McDonald hit
serious obstacles. Emboldened MPs
went on the attack, one describing the
new regulations as a “bureaucratic
morass of irrational rules” and another
likening it to “a Stasi operation”.
Several years later McDonald re-
counted that while appearing before a
parliamentary select committee one
MP’s member of staff had sat just behind
him quietly calling him a “f***ing liar”.
“After about two hours, that gets pret-
ty wearing,” he acknowledged with
commendable understatement. Headded that the MPs had been far from
sheepish about the situation. They were
“up for a fight” and there was a campaign
of intense and determined opposition.
“The early days were quite wild,” he
said. “I’d never experienced anything
like it.” He was surprised that some in
the press had turned against the new
body, criticising the number of staff and
high salaries. “I thought they were
going to be our allies. But so tight was
their grip on the story, they wanted to
determine the outcomes, not simply to
set up the boxing match.”
By this stage McDonald was franker
about the behaviour of MPs than he
would have been had he still been in the
civil service. He said they showed each
other how to game the system to suchMPs attacked his new
proposals, likening them
to ‘a Stasi operation’
Andrew McDonald
First chief executive of the watchdog set up after the MPs’ expenses scandal whose new rules faced ‘unrelenting hostility’
Dean Stockwell
Reluctant child actor turned Hollywood star known for classics such as Paris, Texas and the sci-fi series Quantum Leap
By the early 1980s, Dean Stockwell had
been acting for almost 40 years and was
ready for a career change. Depressed
and demoralised, he had left Holly-
wood and moved to New Mexico,
where he applied for a licence to set up
as an estate agent.
Then he received a phone call from
his fellow actor Harry Dean Stanton.
“He said he’s going to do this movie
with Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders
and thinks I should play his brother in
it,” Stockwell recalled.
The film was Paris, Texas (1984), a clas-
sic road movie that won the Palme d’Or
at Cannes and relaunched Stockwell on
what was to become the most successful
phase of his stop-start career. Over the
next decade or so he went on to appear
in some of the defining films of the era,
including David Lynch’s Blue Velvet
(1986), Jonathan Demme’s Married to
the Mob (for which he was nominated
for an Oscar in 1989) and Francis Ford
Coppola’s The Rainmaker (1997).
In between came his signature per-
formance as the womanising, larger-
than-life Admiral “Al” Calavicci in the
quirky sci-fi television series Quantum
Leap, which ran for five seasons
between 1989 and 1993. His portrayal
earned him not only a Golden Globe
but a rare personal satisfaction. “I’ve
been deeply affected by the sincerity,
warmth and affection coming back to
me from fans of the show. I’ve never
experienced that before in my life,” he
enthused.
Stockwell called his comeback his
“third or fourth career”, for as a seem-
ingly reluctant actor he had walked
away at least twice before. As a child
actor in the 1940s, he appeared on
screen with Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly
threw his Cannes citations into the fire-
place. It was as if in the freewheeling
hedonism of the hippy subculture he
was finally getting to live the carefree
childhood that he had been denied.
“I did some drugs and went to some
love-ins,” he said. “The experience of
those days provided me with a huge,
panoramic view of my existence that I
didn’t have before.” He later co-directed
and appeared in Young’s 1982 film
Human Highway. For a time he found
work hard to come by but starred in such
counter-cultural fringe pictures as
Psych-Out, in which he played a long-
haired hippy guru alongside Jack Nich-
olson, and Dennis Hopper’s 1971 cult
classic The Last Movie. He retired from
the big screen for the final time in 2015,
making another career change to exhib-
it his artworks under his full name,
Robert Dean Stockwell. He cited his
other interests as golf, chess and cigars.
He was divorced from his second wife
Joy Marchenko, a textile designer
whom he met in Cannes in 1976 “at one
o’clock in the morning, on the beach in
front of the Carlton Hotel”. She survives
him with their children Austin and
Sophia. Stockwell spoke movingly of
the pleasures of becoming a father in
middle age; mindful of his childhood
unhappiness, he did all he could to pro-
tect them from the limelight. His first
marriage between 1960 and 1962 to the
actress Millie Perkins, who starred in
the screen version of The Diary Of Anne
Frank, ended in divorce.
Robert Dean Stockwell was born in
1936 in Los Angeles into a showbusi-
ness family. His mother, Betty, was a
vaudeville actress and his father, Harry,
was an actor and singer who appeared
in Broadway productions. His parentsdivorced when he was six and his step-
mother, Nina Olivette, was also an
actress and singer. At six he made his
stage debut alongside his brother, Guy,
and his first significant film appearance
came in the 1945 musical Anchors
Aweigh, alongside Kelly and Sinatra.
“It’s a miserable way to bring up a
child, though neither my parents nor I
recognised it at the time,” he later said.
In one of his films as a child actor he was
required to cry and recalled the direct-
or telling him to “think of a puppy
dying” to get his tear ducts going.
He enrolled at the University of Cali-
fornia but dropped out after a few
months. He received a “psychological
deferment” which helped him to avoid
being drafted to serve in Korea. “I took
drugs and pretended I was a fag,” he said.
Considering a return to acting, he
attended one class at the Actors Studio,
but never went back. His hero at the
time was James Dean and he spent
several years travelling America in a
hobo-like existence, working in rail-
road gangs and picking fruit. When he
returned to the screen aged 21, the
innocent, curly-haired cherub had
turned into a dark, intense and charis-
matic leading man.
“I’m really not a philosophical guy. I
just take it as it comes,” he reflected.
“Things happen in a haphazard way
without cause and effect. One minute
you’re nothing, and the next minute
everything’s going for you.”Dean Stockwell, actor, was born on
March 5, 1936. He died of natural causes
on November 7, 2021, aged 85Stockwell, right, with Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap, which ran for five seriesMOVIESTORE/SHUTTERSTOCKEmail: [email protected]