The MOAT in HIS OWN EYE

At the weekend, The Sunday Times carried a report that the House of Lords Appointments Commission, the functions of which include vetting nominations for the peerage, rejected David Cameron’s submission of his old cabinet colleague Douglas Hogg. Intriguingly – though the paper did not mention this – the commission numbers among its members Cameron’s former mentor and his predecessor as Tory leader, Michael Howard, now Lord Howard of Lympne.

The ostensible explanation for the commission’s decision thus to embarrass the PM was the role that Hogg played in the great scandal over the expenses of MPs in 2009, uncovered and published as a long-running saga by The Daily Telegraph. The particular item among Hogg’s expenses that caught the imagination of the media was his claim for the cost of cleaning the moat that encircles his 50-acre country estate of Kettlethorpe Hall in unfashionable Lincolnshire, the county that also gave birth to Margaret Thatcher.

Douglas Hogg, evidently a flat-cap commoner

Hogg hotly disputed that he had been assisted from the public purse for this item though he found himself unable to confirm that it had been “positively excluded” from his paperwork. Like many of his fellow accused, he reckoned that all his claims had been fully cleared by the parliamentary fees office. On the other hand, by any non-partisan measure, Hogg would be thought rather unfortunate to have been made out as something of a poster boy for the expenses scandal. The site TheyWorkForYou, which monitors all kinds of parliamentary activity, ranked Hogg 617th of 647 members in the cost to the public of his time in parliament.

It was the very grandeur of a home with a moat that caused the trouble, reviving the image of Tory privilege and disconnection from the public that Cameron had sought to play down, especially since finding that he had thoughtlessly appointed fourteen Old Etonians to his front bench while in opposition – both Cameron and Hogg were themselves schooled at Eton College, as indeed were all the Hoggs from way back.

Kettlethorpe Hall, where the snouts go in the trough

Douglas Hogg is the present head of a true political dynasty. The Hoggs have been active in Tory politics, particularly where it intersects with the administration of justice, for the better part of two centuries. But unless one or other of his children, now both around 30, goes into public life, that long connection will be severed. I cannot trace what the junior generation does for a living, if anything,

Douglas Hogg’s great-grandfather was the first of the line to join the titled classes. He was James Hogg (1790-1876), characteristically a Tory lawyer, and he was awarded a baronetcy in 1848. Baronetcies are a curious form of aristocratic life. The only hereditary title that did not entitle the holder to sit in the House of Lords, a baronetcy does confer on its holder the courtesy title of Sir and that honorific ranks above a commoner’s knighthood. Sir George Young, the present Leader of the House, is a baronet – his proper title is Sir George Young, Bart. ‘Bart’ is considered old-fashioned in some quarters and ‘Bt’ preferred. Young is always named with his ‘sir’ but some baronets discard its use.

Among well-known baronets past and present, some of whom went or go by ‘sir’ and some not, were and are: Thomas Beecham, Ranulph Fiennes, Tam Dalyell, Jonathan Porritt, Adam Nicholson, Oswald Mosley, Ferdinand Mount, Keith Joseph and the actor John Standing. Standing’s mother, the actress Kay Hammond, was the daughter of the British-born Hollywood actor Guy Standing. The latter was knighted for his service to Anglo-American relations at the end of World War I and was always billed as Sir Guy but his title was not a baronetcy. John Standing, using his maternal grandfather’s surname for professional purposes, inherited the baronetcy of Lyon (formally he is Sir John Lyon) from his father, but not the old family seat of Bletchley Park, which was sold after his grandmother’s death and soon after became the now legendary home of the Government Code and Cypher School that cracked the German Enigma code.

Quintin Hogg o'the Poly

But back to Hogg heaven. Sir James, the 1st Baronet, though evidently much occupied with legal affairs in one of Britain’s largest and most important colonies, India, as well as twice sitting as an MP, managed to sire fourteen children on his wife. His eldest son, the 2nd Baronet (also James), was born in Calcutta and he too sat as an MP before being sent to the Lords as the 1st Baron Magheramorne.

But Sir James’ seventh son is both of more interest and, happily, sits in the line that leads to Douglas. Quintin Hogg (1845-1903) was a leading educational reformer who founded the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, one of the earliest such institutions. I used to visit it often in the 1960s and ’70s because it housed one of the small independent cinemas then devoted to subtitled movies, the Cameo Poly. The Poly itself still exists (though not the cinema), but for two decades it has been more grandly known as the University of Westminster, of which the Regent Street complex is the hub.

Hogg’s work on the Poly and his continuing financial support of it won him a fine reputation. An improving statue of him, seated over a book with two boys, still stands on a traffic island in Portland Place, just up from both the Poly site and the entrance to BBC Broadcasting House. Surprisingly, though, Hogg received no recognition for his philanthropy from either the monarch or Downing Street.

Douglas, 1st Viscount Hailsham

His son Douglas, however, added a further title to the extended family’s coats of arms. After a successful career as a silk, he served as Attorney General and twice as Lord Chancellor and was raised to the peerage as 1st Viscount Hailsham. Hailsham was the grandfather of the present Hogg. In between comes a fascinating character and one who twice bore the title Lord Hailsham but in differing ways.

Named after his distinguished grandfather, Quintin Hogg (1907-2001) was in style very much the Boris Johnson (another old Etonian) of his day – happy to appear a bit of an ebullient, unguarded buffoon but withal a pretty shrewd operator, which ability allowed him to enjoy a long and colourful career in Tory politics. Having followed the traditional route of attending Eton College and being called to the bar – though, more unusually, Quintin went up to Oxford and was quite a scholar – he fought a famous be-election at Oxford City.

Young Quintin Hogg

It was September 1938 and the great issue of the day was the so-called appeasement of Hitler’s policies of German aggrandizement. Hogg supported the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain who, a fortnight after the by-election, signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler, the famous “piece of paper”. Both the Labour and Liberal candidates stood down at Oxford in favour of an Independent Progressive opposed to appeasement. His slogan was “a vote for Hogg is a vote for Hitler”. Hogg won but he broke with Chamberlain the following year and joined the Churchill faction. He saw action in the war and managed to save his seat in the 1945 Labour landslide. But when his father died in 1950, Hogg succeeded to the Hailsham viscountcy and was obliged to stand down from the Commons.

Through the 1950s, Hailsham tended to his law practice, only returning to the public eye when Harold Macmillan appointed him chairman of the Tory party. This role suited his theatrical antics – he once memorably clanged a large handbell from the platform at the party conference – and gave him a stage that he exploited to the full. He was also good value on television, an increasingly influential showcase for political characters.

Hailsham in his famous appearance in Dr No, recreated by society photographer Denis Healey

Macmillan abruptly stood down as party leader and Prime Minister just before the Conservative party conference of 1963. There was no clear successor – RA Butler, who had already twice missed the boat by a whisker, was once again thought too liberal. In a widely discussed address to the conference, Hailsham threw his hat into the ring, declaring that “I will renounce my peerage”. I can still picture the emotion on his face, a mix of determination, sorrow and, I rather think, acted humility. There had of course been many Tory PMs in the distant past who had blithely governed from a seat in the Lords but in 20th century Britain this was no longer an option. But to give up a title was an unprecedented move for a Tory. Tony Benn had paved the way, renouncing the title of Viscount Stansgate that had come to him on the death of his father, so that he could stand for a Commons seat as, in those days, Anthony Wedgwood Benn.

Quintin Hogg duly became a commoner again. The title of Viscount Hailsham did not die in his renunciation. Upon his death, it sprang to life again on the shoulders of the present Douglas. But in the meantime, the Blair government had removed from hereditary peers their entitlement to sit in the Lords and so Quintin’s son continued to style himself Mr Hogg and stayed in the Commons until the 2010 general election.

Quintin’s grand gesture proved futile. Macmillan’s successor, the last Tory leader to “emerge” from a stitch-up among party grandees at the Carlton Club, was, in a bitter irony, another member of the peerage. The Earl of Home, an archetypal old school Tory aristocrat and denizen of the huntin‘, shootin‘ and fishin‘ set, had been Chamberlain’s aide at Munich. Several leading Tories were appalled at the continuance of a profoundly undemocratic method of leader-appointing and both Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell refused to serve under Home.

Obliged to renounce his own title, the new PM, to be known as Sir Alec Douglas Home, found himself in the unique position of having to begin his premiership by fighting a by-election in order to enter the House of Commons. Hogg too had to face the electors and re-entered the Commons at the end of 1963 as MP for St Marylebone.

The Tories lost office the following year and Home stood down. His successor as party leader, Edward Heath, was the first Tory leader to be elected by the party to that office. When Heath eventually became PM in 1970, he sent Hogg back to the Lords to replicate his father’s role of Lord Chancellor, in which task he served again in Margaret Thatcher’s first two administrations. Hogg was now called Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone and his title was a life peerage merely.

Quintin Hailsham as Lord Chancellor

Hailsham died three days after his 94th birthday. Twice widowed, once divorced, three times Lord Chancellor, twice a peer and ever an unpredictable, irascible and rather lovable character, he clearly overshadowed his son, as charismatic fathers are apt to do.

Douglas Hogg’s only cabinet post was as Agriculture, Fisheries and Food minister in John Major’s second government. He was widely thought to have made a poor job of handling the crisis over BSE, popularly known as Mad Cow Disease. In one of the last public gestures against the Tories before Labour’s 1997 landslide, a farmer drove from Anglesey to Lincolnshire to dump three tonnes of pigshit at the door of Kettlethorpe Hall.

Baroness Hogg

Indeed, Douglas’s wife Sarah may well be thought the more distinguished of the couple. Another scion of a line of Tory politicians. Sarah’s father was John Boyd-Carpenter who served in the Churchill, Eden and Macmillan cabinets. Journalist (she and I were simultaneously on The Independent), broadcaster, company director, committee woman and sometime Fellow of Eton College, she ran the number 10 policy unit when John Major was PM and is now a member of the house of peers in her own right as Baroness Hogg of Kettlethorpe. On this last score, I wonder if her husband is jealous.