Quintin Hogg, 2nd Viscount Hailsham
Liberal-Conservative majority
1953-1965
If Oliver Stanley had formed the mould of future Exile Premiers, Lord Hailsham fit it perfectly and in fact exemplifier what people imagine from the government-in-exile far more than his predecessor. If only thanks to his long tenure. Hailsham had risen to prominence thanks to his election as a United Empire MP who had been one of the first to turn against Beaverbrook’s appeasement of Cagoulard France. He had served on the battlefield of the Second World War, and until Stanley’s merger in 1949 had sat in the Commons as an Independent Conservative.
The prospect of him becoming Prime Minister seemed narrow indeed in 1950 when he ascended to the House of Lords. While the principle that Prime Ministers should be drawn from the Commons had scarcely been established at the point when Parliament had been forced into exile, the only Premier to have served from the Lords since then had been the exceptional case of Lord Trenchard. However, the mere fact of Trenchard’s compromise, the dwindling demographics who engaged in the exile parliamentary politics, and the lack of opposition to concept of a peer premier amongst those who were, were facts in his favour.
When Stanley passed away in 1953, those who ascended from the ranks of the Liberal-Conservatives to claim his position reflected this. They were male and primarily drawn from either the aristocracy or from the wealthy circles of the Imperial Civil Service. The two most prominent candidates at first represented each of these tendencies respectively. The former was the Marquess of Salisbury, whose family had made up for their losses during the flight from Britain by amassing an impressive estate in India and parts of Africa. The latter was the young Hugh Gaitskell, who had made a name for himself in the Imperial Workers Administration during the war. The two represented distinct factions within the Liberal-Conservatives, arguably aligning around some of the old components of Parliament during the Beaverbrook years, Salisbury inheriting the legacy of the United Empire and Gaitskell towing to a distinctly Lloyd-Georgeite line. The conflict between the two threatened to tear the party, which was barely four years old apart, as their world views only rarely aligned. It was at this point that Hailsham entered the fray.
Whereas Salisbury and Gaitskell represented the radical fringes of the party, Hailsham came from a woollier and less solid centre ground but it was this tendency, the inheritor of traditional, pragmatic Toryism that held greater sway within the party. Over the course of the campaign, Hailsham soon proved that he wasn’t just a crusty old peer acting as a spoiler. His campaign was surprisingly modern, and while Salisbury and Gaitskell bit chunks out of one another, Hailsham reminded people that the polarisation they represented had plagued the government forty years ago, resulting in disaster.
Victory was achieved handily, and once in office, Hailsham was keen to secure his legitimacy with a general election. Turnout was low, as was expected, and the result was a Liberal-Conservative landslide, with a tiny Opposition of Liberal Action accompanied by a few Socialists and Nationalists. Over the next twelve years, Hailsham would retain his majority albeit reduced, while the Opposition would change composition dramatically by the time he stepped down in 1965.
Hailsham became Premier at a time of great change in the British Empire. The Indian Empire and many of the colonies in Africa and Asia were being granted responsible self-government, either by the Imperial Council or by the Dominions which had held them in trust. The World Conference mandates in West Africa were being prepared for independence. On a more fundamental level, society was changing. Racialist immigration laws were being abolished by most of the Dominions, while social mores which had been preserved by tradition were being broken down across the world. And where there was reform, there could also be found reaction. Hailsham was a man who did not view himself as a reactionary but who came firmly down against sweeping reform to society. In this he was broadly supported by the exile parliament, but found himself left behind by modernisers in the Dominions and on the Imperial Council. His refusal to follow the lead of the Dominions was largely irrelevant to the lives of those over whom the exile government claimed sovereignty. While homosexuality would only be legalised in Canada after Hailsham left office, it was clear even in the late 1950s that this was the direction in which things were heading, following conclusions by Commissions established in several of the Dominions and by the Imperial Council itself.
Despite this, Hailsham found his most consistent and important opponents in the Right. While his electorate was not particularly motivated by his position on gay rights, his position on decolonisation and white power certainly did excite a certain segment of public opinion. Salisbury found a new avenue for his ambitions as he defended the actions of the South Africa government and other Dominions in Subsaharan Africa, in establishing white minority governments that explicitly excluded the non-white majority from political engagement. In doing so, Salisbury became arguably a more famous person internationally than the Premier. After a certain amount of soul-searching, Hailsham locked arms with the other Dominions in opposing the African Sphere and demanding that they institute democratic reforms to empower the majority. This was not driven by any particular affection for the cause of black liberation but a pragmatic desire to preserve the integrity of the British Empire.
At the 1963 general election, Hailsham preserved a majority which had only been slightly reduced in 1958, but now faced a much more formidable opposition. And this time it was led by Salisbury at the forefront of a reconstituted party called the Imperial Front that claimed the mantle of the United Empire. The Imperial Front operated branches across the Dominions, even enjoying a little success in white communities in India. This was to be the greatest political fight of Hailsham’s life, as his quiet career in a seemingly irrelevant legislature was now placed at the vanguard of a cultural battlefield that would decide the future of one of the world’s premier powers.
The fact was that the battle was in some respects futile. The white settlers of Africa, whether English or Afrikaans speaking, had set aside their differences to preserve what they had conquered. The National Party of South Africa had transitioned from secessionism to neo-imperialism, retroactively co-opting the Victorian colonialist and proponent of British racial supremacism Cecil Rhodes as one of their own. The decision by Hailsham to endorse the sanctions imposed by the other members of the Imperial Council, and the suspension of the Dominions of the African Sphere from the Council, can hardly be said to have had a great impact upon the thoughts of those who gathered in Pretoria to formally declare independence from the British Empire as the Kingdom of Rhodesia. But it did have an explosive impact on the British Empire and on a smaller scale within the exile Parliament.
With the stroke of a pen, a swathe of British Africa, from the Horn of Africa to the Cape had seceded in the name of preserving white racial supremacy. In doing so, they cut off the Imperial Front in the exile Parliament from their most ardent supporters whilst also enduring the accusation that they were traitors. Salisbury quickly went into exile to his estate in Kenya, while the Imperial Front to all intents and purposes collapsed at the election of 1966. For Hailsham however, the tragedy of the secession was too much. After twelve years of mostly quiet service, he made the decision to resign. .
Hailsham lived well past his resignation, seeing the dawn of the 21st century before his death. He is a man with a mixed legacy, with his premiership being seen by many as squandered. He is blamed, mostly unfairly for the decline of this exile government’s relevance, a process which had begun in 1930s and was only noticeable in his tenure due to his longevity and the stature of his predecessors. He wrote extensively both during and after his premiership, particularly on religion. His most famous work,
Feet of Clay, written in the 1970s sharply opposed the disestablishment of the Anglican Church by King-Emperor David IV who formally passed the title of Defender of the Faith to the Lambeth Conference itself. In it, Hailsham made the argument that the British Empire having lost its metropole, relied upon common ideas, traditions and value for unity. One of these was religious unity in the Anglican Church, which he argued had been a driving force for preserving British culture even when settlers were flung to the far corners of the world and even after the loss of the homeland itself. The removal of such a foundation stone put the whole building at risk. The book received much ridicule and condemnation but has since become something a holy book in some conservative circles as making a point for the importance of public religious values.