Other Activities
Mayhew also was active as an advocate for the mentally ill and served as Chairman of MIND (National Association for Mental Health) from 1992-1997. Mayhew wrote several books, including his autobiography, Time To Explain, in 1987. They also include Publish It Not: The Middle East Cover-Up (written with Michael Adams in 1975) which was an account of the Middle East conflict from the Palestinian perspective, unusual for an important British public figure at the time it was published.
Although Christopher Mayhew's career never lived it up to its early promise, he did serve an important role in British political history. Mayhew's defection to the Liberals was to serve, along with Dick Taverne's decision to leave Labour, as the forewarning of the split within the Labour Party that would occur in 1981 with the rise of the Social Democratic Party. Mayhew's defection was an early sign of the large rift growing between the Left and Right in the Labour Party and began the process by which the Liberal party and its political heirs, the SDP-Liberal Alliance and the Liberal Democrats became a major force in British politics.
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