Lord Hailsham: The reluctant peer

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2002 by Jonathan W. Doering

Editor's Note: In last month s issue Jonathan Doering assessed the career of the Labour hereditary peer, Lord Longford, who died in 2001. Now we look at his Tory contemporary, Lord Hailsham. Both men exemplify a British tradition of hereditary service that has now been destroyed.

THERE is a melancholy symmetry that Lord Longford and his contemporary Lord Hailsham (born Quintin McGarel Hogg in 1907) should pass away within a few months of each other. Although aligned to opposing parties, each serving loyally in Parliament for many years, they also had much in common. Both were at Eton and then Oxford, both had experienced academic life before their involvement in politics. Both felt disappointed with their wartime record. Both traced their roots back to Ireland: in Hailsham's case, to Northern Irish Protestants, in Longford's the Protestant Anglo-Irish nobility in the South. On a more personal level, the two became friends, and shared a deep Christian faith. It must also never be forgotten that their public careers were defined to a great extent by their relationship to that curious branch of the state, the House of Lords. Whilst Longford had a trail of failed bids to enter the House of Commons before his ennoblement in 1945, Hailsham, equally a member of the upper classes, stood succe ssfully for two different constituencies, and railed for much of his life against the accident of birth which saw him sent to the Lords following his father's death in 1950. Whilst Longford often served the purpose of a gadfly, jumping from one subject to the next, seeing the defence of difficult attitudes as a duty, Hailsham was generally more focused in his crusades, usually putting party first. For instance, it is hard to imagine him dismissing the findings of the Prestwick air crash inquiry without consulting Cabinet first.

Hailsham in many ways seemed to combine the best of the aristocracy with his family's long record of philanthropy: descendant of the final director of the East India Company, and son of Douglas Hogg, himself a Tory M.P., AttorneyGeneral, and later First Viscount Hailsham and Lord Chancellor for two terms, and an adored mother, Elizabeth, from Nashville, Tennessee (herself the daughter of a judge). He seemed destined for a glittering public career from the start: Newcastle scholar and holder of many other prizes at Eton, winner of a Double First in Classics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Union President; prize fellow in Law at All Souls Oxford, followed by an impressive career at the Bar. Yet his ascendancy was not as smooth and unchallenged as might have been expected. His father's ennoblement in 1928 is said to have left him in tears of frustration, later sending a letter which began thus: 'Dear father, Some are born unto titles: some achieve them and some have them thrust upon them. Pity the third class!' Ha ilsham realised even at such an early point in his life, and at a time when the House of Lords exercised more power than it does now, that his own future ennoblement would all but deny him high political office, a situation that would cause much later disappointment.

Whilst still a Fellow at All Souls, Hailsham was called to the Bar in 1932. He then embarked upon a legal career which was characterised by often brilliant legal exposition, and mercurial temperament. At a time when Longford was combining attempts at a journalistic career with teaching for the WEA, Hailsham did legal aid work in Deptford, as well as working on rather more high profile cases, such as the Brighton Trunk Murder Trial.

In 1938, his opportunity came to enter politics, when the constituency of Oxford City fell vacant in a by-election. His first political clash with the Longford family came at this time, as Lord Longford was at the forefront of the anti-Munich coalition of Labour, Liberal, and Communist parties that put up A. D. Lindsay as an Independent Progressive candidate. Some of the electioneering was sharp, such as the slogan, 'A Vote for Hogg is a Vote for Hitler!' but his wit never left him short of a smart riposte: 'Vote for Hogg and Save Your Bacon'. His staunch support for Chamberlain's Munich Settlement with Hitler seemed to fly in the face of honour and even good sense, although he always maintained that the settlement was a necessary one for a beleaguered Britain on the brink of a war she was almost wholly unprepared for. His insistence on bullishly defending this aspect of the pre-War government's foreign policy may have cost him advancement under Churchill's premiership later, but once events began to turn aga inst Chamberlain's attempts at a negotiated peace Hailsham voted against him in the 1940 Narvik Debate, believing Churchill to be the best hope for the country.

He put his political and legal career on hold, taking a commission in the Tower Hamlets Rifles, in the Rifle Brigade, in 1939, serving in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, finally being invalided out at the rank of captain in 1942 following an attack of jaundice. During this period of service he also spent time in MI(R), the research and development department of MI6; a report on the application of new war technology brought him to the attention of the then Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, who offered him a desk job in his ministry, which oversaw S.O.E., the resistance and sabotage unit charged by Churchill to 'set Europe ablaze'. Hailsham declined, saying that as a young man he should take his risks alongside his contemporaries in combat. Yet ultimately his war record in some ways echoes Longford's: both were invalided out, feeling that to some degree they had not fulfilled the call to arms. In his book, A Sparrow's Flight, Hailsham talks of how friends' exploits which lead to glory and death in many ca ses 'All made me feel very small in my safe position...'. Nonetheless, he served several years overseas in the Army, and so could be said to have been in a more knowledgeable position when Churchill appointed him as Under-Secretary for Air in 1945 than Longford was when Attlee appointed him Under-Secretary for War in the late 1940s.