Leaders In Profile Obscurity To Triumph For Lord Hailsham

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28397, 2 October 1957, Page 9

Leaders In Profile Obscurity To Triumph For Lord Hailsham

[By

JOHN GUINERY]

In 1950 Mr Quintin Hogg, golden boy of the Conservative Party, seemed to many of his friends and colleagues to have reached the end of his political career. It looked like that to the new Lord Hailsham, formerly Mr Hogg, who found himself exiled permanently from his beloved House of Commons on his succession to the title.

Lord Hailsham, still only 43, tried to persuade the Prime Minister, then Mr Attlee, to support legislation to release him from the hereditary disqualification. Mr Attlee gave one of his less positive responses, and Lord Hailsham had to content himself with writing tirades against the whole system. Yet here he is, now, right back at the top, more eminent as Lord Hailsham than he might ever have been if the title had not passed on. As the next chairman of the Conservative Party, he is its white hope to bolster morale in the country for the next General Election. Liveliest Member He is already established, after only a few months, as about the liveliest member of the Cabinet, the man whose contributions Mr Macmillan most enjoys. Would Lord Hailsham have risen so far—he joined the Government only a year ago as First Lord of the Admiralty just before Suez—with any other Prime Minister in the saddle? Mr Macmillan likes the unconventional; and the achievement of Lord Hailsham is that of a politician who does not regard politics as the first, second, or even third, thing in life; who has little aptitude for compromise; who will speak “out of turn’’ and “off the line’’ when his principles deem it necessary; and who flays his opponents in rollicking language unusual in this day and age. Characteristic has been his insistence in his short spell as Minister of Education that any cuts in standards would be made over his dead body. Equally characteristic has been his belligerent supnort of the Suez intervention, including vigorous denunciation, in the U.S., of American behaviour; and His recent verbal assault on the power of Union leader Frank Cousins. Poet Scholar Lord Hailsham is a scholar and a lawyer. He romped to a double first degree at Oxford and was a Fellow of exclusive All Souls from 1931 to 1938. He was called to the Bar in 1932 and took silk eleven years later. A scholar and a lawyer with a true soldier’s courage, there is nothing desiccated about his feelings, which find expression in lyric verse—not, perhaps, of the highest quality—some of which has been published since he has been Minister of Education. This versifying is not taken seriously by him. He does it for relaxation. One of his love lyrics was composed at the height of the Sue.- crisis, while strolling in St. James’s Park. Other recreations are walking, climbing, shooting and gardening, during which his mind is always working over-time. He is an indefatigable ideas man. Not all his ideas have been equally happy. As Mr Hogg, he entered Parliament in a glare of publicity in the Oxford City byelection in 1938, on the Chamberlain “appeasement” ticket. But he was appointed Undersecretary for Air in the Churchill caretaker Government of 1945, after fighting in the Western Desert as a major, and being wounded. Swept out of office with all his fellow Torries, he reflected on the Labour Party’s predominence in the field of propaganda and wrote an answer to the spate of left-wing pamphlets in “The case for Conservatism,” in 1947. TV Personality He made his mark as a brilliant debater in the House of Commons, and as a popular, hard-hitting personality on radio and later on television. For all his aristocratic intellect, Lord Hailsham has a gift for the common touch enjoyed by very few politicians. A clue to this talent lies in those things which he regards as more important than politics, religion, country, family, friends, and even, at times, profession. Christianity is his great inspiration; and his other priorities are those which most other people, in different order, follow when they have to choose.

He has a quick and broad sense of humour, and a boyish appeal which is summed up by his tendency to grin triumphantly in moments of success and clench his fists above his shoulder. This can sometimes be infuriating to his opponents but makes him look delightfully human. He is very much a family man. with four extremely lively young children—two sons and two daughters—in his cheerful home at Putney. The fact that he was more or less born into politics has helped him to wear them easily. His father, the first Lord Hailsham, was a Conservative Minister—, Attorney-General and Lord Chancellor—in the government of the twenties.

Will the son rise even higher? The impediment of being excluded from the House of Commons will prevent his ever becoming Prime Minister, unless Lords reform, which he has advocated so strenuously, enabled him to move back. But the rescue of the Conservative Party from the present slough of electoral unpopularity would be a sufficient title to fame. (Central Press)