Man found dead after swimming in River Wye named as member of House of Lords

[Hereford Voice]

The body of Lord David Lipsey was recovered on 1 July, after a multi-agency search, Dyfed-Powys Police have confirmed.

Dyfed-Powys Police said they received a report concerning the safety of a man last seen swimming in the River Wye at Glasbury.

Lord Lipsey's next of kin have been informed and have asked for their privacy to be respected.

Dyfed-Powys Police said in a statement that the force's thoughts were with them.

Lord Lipsey, who previously worked as a journalist and Downing Street adviser under then prime minister Jim Callaghan, entered the Lords in 1999.

The Lord Speaker John McFall said the upper chamber extended its 'condolences to the noble Lord's family and friends'.

Lord Lipsey had lived in the Wye Valley for the last three decades and told the House of Lords last October how he and his wife, Margaret, would go swimming in Glasbury 'most mornings' and 'some mornings in the winter'.

But he told the chamber of the deteriorating condition of the river due to 'chicken s***' that had not moved off farms and been driven by water into the stream.

He said it made the river smell of 'rotten egg', children were getting sick after swimming in it, and it had caused the numbers of salmon to dwindle.

In a speech during the second reading of the Water Special Measures Bill he said: 'Residents such as us complain about children who are sick after swimming, rotten egg odours, opaque green pea-soup blooms and brown slime on the bottom. It is not the Wye that we moved next to 30 years ago.

'This beautiful river is being turned into a sewage dump.'

Lord Lipsey was given a life peerage by Tony Blair and was a journalist for papers including the Sunday Times, Guardian and Economist.