THIS PIECE WAS written in May 1985, when there was some speculation that Lord Hailsham should be replaced as Lord Chancellor by a younger man. Happily he survived this minor storm and was only replaced after the Election in June 1987. Happily, since then he has has also remarried.
‘Forgive me if I don’t get up,’ said Lord Hailsham. ‘My leaping days are over.’ Not so Spotty, his Jack Russell puppy, who, totally unawed by his master’s splendid office in the House of Lords, leapt all over the desk, scattering papers, bulldog clips and white quill pens.
‘I am no good at training dogs,’ said Lord Hailsham. ‘My spaniel, Mr Jones, always sang with excitement when I took him shooting and never passed his O levels retrieving. Sit, Spotty.’
Spotty took no notice.
‘Only Maggie can control him,’ sighed the Lord Chancellor. ‘A word from her, a steely look, and Spotty capitulates: he recognises the ultimate authority.’ Envisaging a thrilling new Barbara Woodhouse career for Mrs Thatcher, I said I didn’t know she liked dogs.
‘No, no, Maggie my driver. The PM is always Margaret.’
His eyes creased with laughter. He is a huge tease.
The round face, full of wisdom and kindness, has a beaky nose, pixie ears, and rather wild wrinkles on his forehead, as though the wind had blown them askew. Like a garden gnome rigged out for town, he wore striped trousers and a black coat, softened by a scarlet handkerchief and a scattering of dog hairs. Nearly seventy-eight, his mind is as needle-sharp as Spotty’s teeth.
As Lord Chancellor heading a ten-thousand strong department, he runs the courts, appoints judges, and has instigated many reforms in civil law. As a senior minister, he also provides one of the few voices of distinction and scholarship in the cabinet. Mrs Thatcher not only finds his waspish humour invaluable for pricking the bubbles of her more pompous colleagues, but is also reassured by his wealth of experience.
He is unshocked, for example, by the increased thuggery in the House, Mr Kinnock calling Mrs T a twister, David Owen being howled down by Labour yobbos.
‘Politics was far rougher before World War One. Feeling ran much higher. Asquith was repeatedly howled down, and I remember my uncle telling me how Ronnie Macneil, who later became Lord Cushendon, hurled Erskine May across the House.’
‘Who was he?’
‘He was a very large book,’ said Lord Hailsham kindly.
The pedagogic precision is always tempered by dramatic pauses and great wheezes of laughter like a huge bellows.
Quintin Hailsham was born into an intensely political and legal family. His beautiful American mother was a judge’s daughter. His brilliant lawyer father went straight on to the front bench, as Bonar Law’s attorney general, became Lord Chancellor and was strongly tipped as a future leader.
Little Quintin’s now famous qualities of unassailable loyalty and eruptive temper had established themselves by the age of two when his nanny was sacked for hitting him.
‘I was devoted to Nanny, even if she did hit me. When my mother – whom I held entirely responsible for Nanny’s departure – came to say goodnight afterwards, I quoted Beatrix Potter, with whose works I was already familiar, and shouted: “Go away you ugly old toad.”’
At six he showed further evidence of independence.
‘I had heard my father discussing the Irish Question, and announced in the nursery that I couldn’t see why the Irish couldn’t rule themselves. My half-brother sneaked to my father, who gravely chided me for being a very silly little boy. I have been a Conservative ever since.’
The cleverest boy ever to go to Eton, a double first at Oxford where he notched up more alphas than anyone since Gladstone, he secured Oxford for the Tories in 1928, and made such an impressive maiden speech that MPs tipped him as a future Lord Chancellor.
All dreams of a political career where shattered when his father was offered a peerage.
‘I begged him not to take it, correctly divining that the House of Lords would not be the way to the top. Unfortunately my stepmother, a country parson’s daughter from Kenya, not the calibre of my mother, rather Memsahib in fact (again the bellows wheezes of laughter), was attracted to the peerage and persuaded my father to accept. Alas, a step up for her was a step down for me.’
As a future peer, realising he would be forced to play for the second eleven, he turned to his first love, the law. But, as with his contemporary at Eton, Randolph Churchill, this second brilliant career was halted by the war. Although he was repeatedly offered high-powered desk jobs, Lord Hailsham ‘having voted for the war’ was with characteristic integrity determined to fight in it. Joining the Rifle Brigade, he was wounded in the Western Desert.
In his lifetime, he has served under seven prime ministers. Chamberlain, he stresses, was much maligned.
‘He saved the country at Munich. He knew if we’d gone to war in 1938, we’d have been hopelessly unprepared.’
Churchill, by contrast, was a genius brought in by providence. ‘If Winston had not been in the wilderness until 1940, he’d have been hopelessly compromised by his earlier decisions. As it was, he got it as wrong as anyone. He told me France would hold out and mobilise millions, that Turkey would come in on our side. He was wildly over-optimistic.’
After the war, Lord Hailsham returned joyfully to the bar. But in 1955 – at a fraction of the salary he was earning as a lawyer – he somewhat reluctantly accepted the post of First Lord of the Admiralty in Anthony Eden’s government. Immediately he was catapulted into the Suez crisis, where at the beginning Eden kept him very much in the dark.
‘Ships were mobilising without my knowing anything about it, it was rather a shock.’
Later Lord Hailsham and his wife were giving a children’s party at Admiralty House.
‘Hoards of little ones sliding down the bannisters, when suddenly Eden summoned me. He sent for the Secretaries of State for War and Air as well. We all arrived with our trousers padded, bearing files to justify whatever misdemeanour we were supposed to have committed, only to be told Eden was resigning. He was not a prime minister – too much of a fusspot, too preoccupied with detail, and what other people’s departments were doing.’
Lord Hailsham’s great triumph, which he refers to in legal terms as ‘my most important case (unpaid)’, was as party chairman orchestrating the Tory landslide of one hundred seats in 1959, after Tory popularity had hit rock bottom two years before. With his bicycling to work, bell ringing, and bathing at party conferences, Lord Hailsham made himself so well known in the country that Macmillan became jealous and for a time relations were frosty between them.
‘Harold Macmillan was on the devious side,’ said Lord Hailsham broodingly. ‘But at least he was unflappable.’ He brightened. ‘I invented that word. Macmillan had whizzed off to Australia, having described the resignation of Peter Thorneycroft, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with more panache than judgement as “a little local difficulty”. I was left to smooth things over. Refusing to suck up and describe Macmillan as a great leader, I described him as “unflappable”. The word has now passed into the language.’
The refusal to suck up may have cost him the leadership. In 1963, when Macmillan resigned from ill-health after the Profumo crisis, Quintin Hailsham was his first choice as successor. Hailsham promptly announced his intention to renounce his peerage at the party conference.
‘It was a jam-packed electric occasion,’ remembers a Tory MP. ‘Quintin came across as a brilliant, vibrant, wonderfully exciting orator, in direct line from Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill. By comparison, Butler and Maudling seemed drab and lifeless. When Quintin announced he was giving up his peerage, the cheering nearly blew the roof off.’
But tragically, things went wrong. Quintin Hogg, as he was now called again, was loved by the Tory rank and file but had enemies in the cabinet. To people who absorb the butter of flattery quicker than a frying aubergine, he was abrasive and unpredictable.
‘He always speaks his mind,’ said an ex-minister. ‘And although he apologises afterwards, it can be very disagreeable until he does. He could, and still can be, insensitive to atmosphere, banging on at cabinet meetings. You can sit back and enjoy the distraction, saying this is frightfully good stuff, but self-important, rather mediocre people think it’s wasting time.’
He was perhaps too emotional, too volatile, a touch exhibitionist. The English love eccentrics, but prefer them caged in an Oxford quad, or writing poetry like John Betjemen. Macmillan, persuaded by the cabinet to play safe, chose the reticent, mild-mannered, diplomatic Lord Home, who waited to renounce his peerage until he had the leadership in the bag.
Today Lord Hailsham plays down his disappointment. ‘Being prime minister doesn’t bring happiness.’
But until then he had regularly written poetry. With the loss of the leadership, the muse deserted him too. He never wrote another line.
‘In fact Quintin was heartbroken,’ said a fellow MP and close friend. ‘Bitterly disappointed. And it was a tragedy. He would have made a great prime minister, an intellectual giant, utterly fearless, with total integrity. People question his judgement, but on important matters he was always right: about wanting us to join Europe straight after the war, about the colour problem, denouncing Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech and tempering much right-wing opinion.’
Did he think himself he would have made a great prime minister?
Lord Hailsham examined the thin, jeaned legs of a workman sidling along his window ledge, and then smiled.
‘As the White Knight remarked, I do not say it would have been better. I only say it would have been different.’
True to form, he served with the utmost loyalty under Alec Douglas-Home (‘the nicest prime minister there’s ever been, but stronger on foreign policy than at home’), and later as Lord Chancellor under Edward Heath, whom he liked but found ‘difficult to reach personally’.
Although he wept openly when Heath was ousted by Mrs Thatcher, always putting party before self, he instantly transferred his loyalty to the new leader, and was rewarded in 1979, when she gave him a second stint as Lord Chancellor.
As someone who considered party loyalty all-important, didn’t he feel Heath had been rotten to Mrs Thatcher? Lord Hailsham shrugged: ‘One must not underestimate how traumatic it was for Edward Heath to be ejected by Margaret Thatcher. To have just missed being prime minister as I did was bad enough. But as Chief of the Tribe to be de-stooled is far more terrible. Edward Heath was good enough to ask me to Macmillan’s ninetieth birthday party, and produced a bottle of 1874 claret. It was still good – just imagine it was harvested when Bismark was chancellor.’
Side-stepping tricky questions like a matador, he refused to comment on the Tories’ poor performance in the local elections. Didn’t he think Mrs Thatcher ought to let up a little and apply the brake?
He pondered for a minute, examining his huge signet ring, once again regarding compliments to a leader he admires hugely as sucking up.
‘Like her, I am a workaholic, I work fast. Some’, he raised an eyebrow at two minions scribbling down every word at the end of the vast polished table, ‘would say too fast. You have to look at Margaret Thatcher pre-bomb and post-bomb. She was so outstanding, showed so much courage after the Brighton bomb. She may well have suffered a little from post-bomb shock. Shock takes different forms. After I pranged my car in January, my doctor told me this. The Prime Minister carried on working without a pause. If you insist on keeping going, you may temporarily have to appear a little sterner and most forceful to stay on course.’
Having described Neil Kinnock as ‘an inexperienced second rater’ some months ago, he has revised his opinion.
‘Neil Kinnock took that jibe of mine very well indeed, and came back with a genial and handsome answer. What he said about the Brighton bomb, his sense of outrage, was absolutely right. Basically he is a very nice man, but not I think a large figure. Denis Healey, on the other hand, is a heavyweight – a bully and a thug, but a man of great stature.’
He also has a soft spot for David Owen. ‘I like the fellow, not many do. He can be brash and abrasive, rather like myself, but he had the courage to leave his awful party. He is a very considerable person, much larger than David Steel.’
The Alliance, he felt, had done rather less well in the local elections than expected.
‘Nothing will happen until the SDP and the Liberals become one party, exchanging their twin beds for the matrimonial couch, until the blushing bride Steel says yes to bridegroom Owen, and they consummate the marriage.’
As Lord Chancellor, he is also speaker of the House of Lords, sitting on the crimson woolsack in a long wig and splendid black robes. According to Lord Longford, fellow Etonian and sparring partner over sixty years, ‘Quintin’s the most impressive Lord Chancellor we’ve ever had. He’s always been frightfully theatrical of course. In fact he’s far better in drag than out of it.’
While Viscount Macmillan admits the best seat in the Lords is at Hailsham’s feet. ‘Quintin lounges with his wig askew, and you think he’s fast alseep, then he suddenly comes out with some devastating aside. He’s at his best when the bishops are holding forth. Of course he knows far more about their subject than they do.’
The greatest tragedy of Lord Hailsham’s life was in 1978 when his wife Mary was killed in a riding accident, aged only fifty-five. Her face, merry, lively, charming, looks out of two pale-blue photograph frames on his desk. He says he will never get over her death, and assuages his loneliness in work and by lavishing affection on little Spotty, who was now noisily crunching a Bonio on the crimson carpet. He refuses to give up his rambling house in Putney for a smaller, more central place because there’d be no room for all his books.
‘He’s always got a different excuse,’ said a friend. ‘He can be frightfully obstinate.’
According to his daughter-in-law, journalist Sarah Hogg, he is a wonderful grandfather: ‘Despite his massive workload, he finds time to write to my daughter every week. The only cloud on their relationship was when she refused to be confirmed and he started bombarding her with twelve-page letters, until she decided it would be easier to give in. All his five grandchildren lecture him dreadfully, particularly on his clothes – “You can’t wear that awful old shirt” – he takes it like a lamb, rather enjoys it. Children adore him, because he never talks down to them.’
In the Boer War, the bullet that would have killed his father was diverted by a silver flask in his pocket. One hopes that any prospective bullet that might be given him by Mrs Thatcher is deflected by his wit and great wisdom. There’s plenty of life in the old Hogg yet.