Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone

Quintin McGarel Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone, KG, CH, PC, QC, FRS (9 October 1907 – 12 October 2001), who held the title 2nd Viscount Hailsham from 1950 to 1963, was a British politician known for the length of his career, the vigour with which he campaigned for the Conservative Party, and the influence of his political writing. He was considered for the leadership of his party (which would have led to his becoming Prime Minister) in 1963, and held for more than a decade the office formerly held by his father, Lord Chancellor.

Born in London, Hogg was the son of Douglas Hogg, 1st Viscount Hailsham, who was Lord Chancellor under Stanley Baldwin, and grandson of another Quintin Hogg, a merchant, philanthropist and educational reformer. He was educated as a King's Scholar at Eton College, where he won the Newcastle Scholarship in 1925, and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association and the Oxford Union. He became a Prize Fellow of All Souls in 1931. Although originally he read classics, he won his prize fellowship in law and was called to the bar in 1932. He spoke in opposition to the motion "That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country" in a debate of 1933 at the Oxford Union. His favourite hobby was mountain-climbing, and his ankles were broken so many times that in old age he was able to walk only with two canes.

Hogg participated in his first election campaign in the 1924 general election, and all subsequent general election campaigns until his death. In 1938, Hogg was chosen as a candidate for Parliament in the Oxford by-election. This election took place shortly after the Munich Agreement and the Labour candidate Patrick Gordon-Walker was persuaded to step down to allow a unified challenge to the Conservatives; A. D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol College fought as an 'Independent Progressive' candidate. Hogg narrowly defeated Lindsay, who was said to be horrified by the popular slogan of "Hitler wants Hogg".

Hogg voted against Neville Chamberlain in the Norway Debate of May 1940, and supported Winston Churchill. He served briefly in the desert campaign as a platoon commander with the Rifle Brigade during the Second World War. His commanding officer had been his contemporary at Eton; after him and the second-in-command, Hogg was the third-oldest officer in the battalion. After a knee wound in August 1941, which almost cost him his right leg, Hogg was deemed too old for further front-line service, and later served on the staff of General "Jumbo" Wilson before leaving the army with the rank of major. In the run-up to the 1945 election, Hogg wrote a response to the book Guilty Men, called The Left was never Right.

Hogg's father died in 1950 and Hogg entered the House of Lords as the 2nd Viscount Hailsham. Believing his political career to be over he concentrated on the bar for some years, becoming head of his chambers, and did not at first hold office when the Conservatives returned to power in 1951. He became First Lord of the Admiralty under Eden in 1956, and under Macmillan was chairman of the party and campaign organiser for the 1959 general election.

Hogg appeared before the Wolfenden Committee to discuss homosexuality. The historian Patrick Higgins said that he used it as "an opportunity to express his disgust". He stated "The instinct of mankind to describe homosexual acts as "unnatural" is not based on mere prejudice" and that homosexuals were corrupting and "a proselytising religion".

In June 1963 when his fellow Minister John Profumo had to resign after admitting telling lies to Parliament about his private life, Hogg (now Hailsham) attacked him savagely on television. Sir Reginald Paget called this "a virtuoso performance of the art of kicking a friend in the guts". He added, "When self-indulgence has reduced a man to the shape of Lord Hailsham, sexual continence involves no more than a sense of the ridiculous".

He was Leader of the House of Lords when Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister, announced his sudden resignation for health reasons at the start of the 1963 Conservative Party conference. At that time there was no formal ballot for the Conservative Party leadership. Hailsham, who was at first Macmillan's preferred successor, announced that he would use the newly enacted Peerage Act to disclaim his title and fight a by-election and return to the House of Commons. His publicity-seeking antics at the Party Conference (e.g. feeding his baby daughter in public, and allowing his supporters to distribute "Q" (for Quintin) badges) were considered vulgar at the time, so Macmillan did not encourage senior party members to choose him as his successor.

Hogg failed to win the leadership bid but did win his father's old constituency of St Marylebone. He remarked to a journalist "After all, I am only 55. Perhaps about 1970 if there was a Tory government some ass might make me Lord Chancellor" – a remark which caused some amusement when in June 1970 there was a Tory government and Edward Heath did make him Lord Chancellor.

Hogg as a campaigner was known for his robust rhetoric and theatrical gestures. He was renowned as one of the great Conservative speakers: his addresses to the party as chairman in 1958 and 1959 were remembered for decades afterwards. He was usually in good form in dealing with hecklers, a valuable skill in the 1960s, and was prominent in the 1964 general election. One evening when giving a political address, he was hailed by his supporters as he leaned over the podium pointing at a long-haired heckler. He said, "Now, see here, Sir or Madam whichever the case might be, we have had enough of you!" The police ejected the man and the crowd applauded and Hogg went on as if nothing had happened. Another time, when a Labour Party supporter waved a Harold Wilson placard in front of him, Hogg smacked it with his walking stick.

He served in the Conservative shadow cabinet during the Wilson government, and built up his practice at the Bar where one of his clients was the Prime Minister and political opponent Harold Wilson. When Edward Heath won the 1970 general election he received a life peerage as Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone, of Herstmonceux in the County of Sussex, and became Lord Chancellor. Hogg was the first to return to the House of Lords as a life peer after having disclaimed an hereditary peerage. Hailsham's choice of Lord Widgery as Lord Chief Justice was criticised by his opponents, although he later redeemed himself in the eyes of the profession by appointing Lord Lane to succeed Widgery.

Hailsham announced his retirement after the end of the Heath government in 1974. He popularised the term 'elective dictatorship' in 1976, later writing a detailed exposition, The Dilemma of Democracy. However, after the violent death of his second wife, he decided to return to active politics, first as a shadow minister without portfolio in the Shadow Cabinets of Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, then again as Lord Chancellor from 1979 to 1987 under Margaret Thatcher.

He was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1975 and became a Knight of the Garter in 1988.

Hailsham was married three times. He was married firstly in 1931 to Natalie Sullivan. The marriage ended in divorce in 1943 when he returned from the war to find her, as he later put it in a television interview, "not alone"; she was with French president Charles de Gaulle's chef de cabinet, François Coulet, with whom she remained until his death in 1984, dying in 1987.

On 18 April 1944 he married Mary Evelyn Martin (born 19 May 1919, died 10 March 1978), a descendant of the Martyn family of The Tribes of Galway. The marriage was happy and lasted 34 years, until her death in front of her husband in a horse riding accident during a visit to Sydney. They had five children:

• Rt Hon Douglas Martin Hogg, 3rd Viscount Hailsham, QC, PC (born 5 February 1945)
• Hon Dame Mary Claire Hogg, DBE (born 15 January 1947)
• Hon Frances Evelyn Hogg, OBE (born 11 November 1949)
• Hon James Richard Martin Hogg (born 1951)
• Hon Katherine Amelia Hogg (born 18 October 1962)

In 1986 Hailsham married Deirdre Margaret Shannon Aft, who predeceased him in 1998.

On his death in October 2001, just after his 94th birthday, the viscountcy that he had disclaimed in 1963 was inherited by his elder son Douglas. As a result of the House of Lords Act 1999, which removed right of most hereditary peers to sit in the House of Lords, it was not necessary for him to disclaim his viscountcy to remain an MP.

Hogg's 1945 book The Left was Never Right was a fierce response to two books in Victor Gollancz's 'Victory Books' series, Guilty Men by Frank Owen and Michael Foot, and Your M.P. by Tom Wintringham, both published during the war and largely discrediting Tory MPs as appeasers and war profiteers. The Wintringham volume had been republished in the lead up to the 1945 general election, widely acknowledged at the time as a major factor in shifting public opinion away from the Conservative party. Hogg's book sought to contrast Wintringham's statistics on appeasement with patriotic statistics of his own, maintaining that Labour MPs had been lacking in their wartime duties.

Perhaps his most important book, the Penguin paperback The Case for Conservatism, was a similar response to Labour Marches On by John Parker MP. Published in 1947 in the aftermath of the crushing Conservative election defeat of 1945, and aimed at the mass market and the layman, it presented a well-written and coherent case for Conservatism.

According to the book, the role of Conservatism is not to oppose all change but to resist and balance the volatility of current political fads and ideology, and to defend a middle position that enshrines a slowly changing organic humane traditionalism.

For example, in the 19th century Conservatives opposed classic Liberalism, favouring factory regulation, market intervention and controls to mitigate the effects of laissez faire capitalism, but in the 20th century the role of Conservatism was to oppose a danger from the opposite direction, the excessive regulation, intervention and controls favoured by Socialism.

Hailsham was also known for his writings on faith and belief. In 1975 he published his spiritual autobiography The Door Wherein I Went, which included a brief chapter of Christian apologetics, using legal arguments concerning the evidence for the life of Christ. The book included a particularly moving passage about suicide; when he was a young man his half-brother Edward Marjoribanks had taken his own life, and the experience left Hailsham with a deep conviction that suicide is always wrong. His writings on Christianity have been the subject of discussion in the writings of Ross Clifford. Hailsham revisited themes of faith in his memoirs A Sparrow's Flight, and the book's title alluded to remarks about sparrows and faith recorded in Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the words of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew.

• The Door Wherein I Went (London: Collins, 1975).
• A Sparrow's Flight: Memoirs (London: HarperCollins, 1990).

• Ross Clifford, Leading Lawyers Case for the Resurrection (Alberta: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy, 1996).

• Quintin Hogg, Esq (1907–1929)
• The Hon. Quintin Hogg (1929–1938)
• The Hon. Quintin Hogg, MP (1938–1950)
• The Rt Hon. The Viscount Hailsham (1950–1953)
• The Rt Hon. The Viscount Hailsham, QC (1953–1956)
• The Rt Hon. The Viscount Hailsham, PC, QC (1956–1963)
• The Rt Hon. Quintin Hogg, QC (1963)
• The Rt Hon. Quintin Hogg, QC, MP (1963–1970)
• The Rt Hon. The Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone, PC, QC (1970–1975)
• The Rt Hon. The Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone, CH, PC, QC (1975–1988)
• The Rt Hon. The Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone, KG, CH, PC, QC (1988–2001)