My father, Robert Priddle, who has died aged 84, was a civil servant and energy specialist who ultimately became the executive director of the International Energy Agency, a role he enjoyed and which he fulfilled in Paris, a city that he loved.
Robert was born in Cheam, Surrey, to Albert, a stockbroker, and Alberta. After gaining scholarships first to King’s college school in Wimbledon and then to Cambridge University, where he studied history, in 1960 he entered the civil service. There he specialised in aerospace until 1973, energy until 1985, and trade and industry thereafter.
He loathed intolerance: he watched the government’s battle against the striking miners in 1984-85 with deep unease, especially since he was responsible for administering the policy. He liked neither Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, nor Ian MacGregor, the chairman of the National Coal Board, and felt communities had been abandoned even if the case for long-term deep coal mining was unsupportable.
Although his politics were appropriately non-ideological, he was a politically articulate man. By the end of his career his greatest concern was that Britain had become a country in which wealth was so unevenly and unfairly shared that the ladder to reasonable prosperity had been pulled up for many people.
By 1992 he was a deputy secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry, but that year had a falling-out with the secretary of state, Michael Heseltine. After announcing pit closures, Heseltine was embarrassed to find that those supporting the demonstrating miners included residents of Kensington and Chelsea. This left Robert feeling that he might not rise much further.
For the next two years he was deputy secretary in charge of corporate and consumer affairs at the DTI, and then took up the International Energy Agency post (1994-2002). The organisation advised governments on energy policy and climate change, and towards the end of his time in Paris Robert was appointed Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (2001).
Dividing his time in retirement between the UK and the Loire Valley in France, he was a keen supporter of local environmental initiatives in Hampshire.
He is survived by his wife, Janice, whom he married in 1962, his children, Duncan and me, and grandchildren, Luc and Milo.
