Simon Jenkins on Chris Woodhead: ‘He climbed an argument as he climbed a mountain, because it was there’

Chris Woodhead was a fanatical mountaineer. When tiring of the pressure of educational politics, he and his wife, Christine, moved to a cottage in Wales, on the near inaccessible slopes of his beloved Cnicht, in Snowdonia. He dreamed of climbing the days away. Yet within a year of arriving, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. I went with him on one of his last walks up the mountain, and recall him remarking that every climber wants to die on a mountain. I said I would always help him...