Lord Longford

Francis Aungier Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, 1st Baron Pakenham, Baron Pakenham of Cowley, (5 December 1905 – 3 August 2001), known to his family as Frank Longford and styled Lord Pakenham from 1945 to 1961, was a British politician and social reformer. A member of the Labour Party, he was one of its longest-serving politicians. He held cabinet positions on several occasions between 1947 and 1968. Longford was politically active until his death in 2001. A member of an old, landed Anglo-Irish family, the Pakenhams (who became Earls of Longford), he was one of the few aristocratic hereditary peers ever to serve in a senior capacity within a Labour government.

Longford was famed for championing social outcasts and unpopular causes. He is especially notable for his lifelong advocacy of penal reform. Longford visited prisons on a regular basis for nearly 70 years until his death. He advocated for rehabilitation programmes and helped create the modern British parole system in the 1960s following the abolition of the death penalty. His ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the release of Moors murderer Myra Hindley attracted much media and public controversy. For this work, the Longford Prize is named after him. It is awarded annually during the Longford Lecture and recognises achievement in the field of penal reform.

As a devout Christian determined to translate faith into action, he was known for his bombastic style and his eccentricity. Although a shrewd and influential politician, he was also widely unpopular among Labour leaders, particularly for his lack of ministerial ability, and was moved from cabinet post to cabinet post, never serving more than two years at any one ministry. Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson opined that Longford had the mental capacity of a 12-year-old.

In 1972, he was made a Knight of the Garter. In the same year, he was appointed to head the group charged with investigating the effects of pornography on society which published the controversial Pornography Report (the Longford Report). He became known as a campaigner against pornography and held the view that it was degrading to both its users and to those who worked in the trade, especially women. Longford was also an outspoken critic of the British press, and once said it was "trembling on the brink of obscenity".

Longford was instrumental in decriminalising homosexuality in the United Kingdom, but was always forthright with his strong moral disapproval of homosexual acts on religious grounds. He opposed furthering gay rights legislation, including the equalisation of the age of consent, and also supported the passage of Section 28.

Background and education

Born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, he was the second son of Thomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of Longford in the Peerage of Ireland. He was educated at Eton College and New College, Oxford, where as an undergraduate he was a member of the Bullingdon Club. Despite having failed to be awarded a scholarship, he graduated with a first-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and became a don at Christ Church.

Political career

After a disastrous spell in stockbroking with Buckmaster & Moore, in 1931 the 25-year-old Pakenham joined the Conservative Research Department where he developed education policy for the Conservative Party. Elizabeth persuaded him to become a socialist. They were married on 3 November 1931 and had eight children. In 1940, only a few months after the onset of the Second World War, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was invalided out of the armed forces. The same year, he became a Roman Catholic. His wife was initially dismayed by this, for she had been brought up a Unitarian and associated the Church of Rome with reactionary politics, but in 1946 she joined the same church.

Pakenham embarked on a political career. In July 1945 he contested Oxford against the sitting Conservative member, Quintin Hogg, but was defeated by nearly 3,000 votes. In October of that year he was created Baron Pakenham, of Cowley in the City of Oxford, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, by the Labour government of Clement Attlee, and took his seat in the House of Lords as one of the few Labour peers. He was immediately appointed a Lord-in-waiting by Attlee. In 1947, he was appointed deputy Foreign Secretary, outside the cabinet, with special responsibility for the British zone in occupied Germany. He made headlines by telling German audiences that the British people forgave them for what had happened in the war; at his death, the Lord Bishop of Birmingham remarked that West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was supposed to have "counted him as one of the founders of the Federal Republic". In May 1948, he was moved to the lower-profile role of Minister of Civil Aviation and was sworn of the Privy Council in June of that year. He continued in this post until May 1951. From May until the fall of the administration in October 1951, he was First Lord of the Admiralty.

In 1961, Pakenham inherited from his brother the earldom of Longford in the Peerage of Ireland and from then onward was generally known to the public as ''Lord Longford''. When Labour returned to power in October 1964 under Harold Wilson, Longford was appointed Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords, despite the fact that Wilson had little respect for him. In December 1965 he became Secretary of State for the Colonies, continuing as Leader of the House of Lords. After only four months at the Colonial Office, he was removed from the post for failing to master his brief, and again became Lord Privy Seal in April 1966. Wilson often talked about sacking Longford from his government, which is believed by some to have led to Longford's resignation as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords in January 1968 – though the actual occasion of his resignation was the failure of Education Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker to agree to the raising of the school-leaving age. In 1972 he was created a Knight of the Garter.

Penal reform

Longford began visiting prisoners in the 1930s when he was a city councillor in Oxford, and continued to do so every week, all around the country, until shortly before his death in 2001. Among the thousands he befriended and helped were a small number of individuals who had committed the most notorious crimes, including child murderer Myra Hindley.

In 1956, he set up New Bridge Foundation, an organisation that aimed to help prisoners stay in touch with society and integrate them back into it.

New Bridge set up ''Inside Time'' in 1990, the only national newspaper for the UK's prison population. , novelist and journalist Rachel Billington, Longford's daughter, worked at the title one day a week. Longford organised many debates on prison reform in the House of Lords from the 1950s onward, and in 1963 chaired the commission whose report recommended reform in sentencing policy and the establishment of a parole system.

Longford was a leading figure in the Nationwide Festival of Light of 1971, protesting against the commercial exploitation of sex and violence, and advocating the teaching of Christ as the key to recovering moral stability in the nation. His anti-pornography campaigning made him the subject of derision and he was labelled by the press as ''Lord Porn'' when he and former prison doctor Christine Temple-Saville set out on a wide-ranging tour of sex industry establishments in the early 1970s to compile a self-funded report. The press made much of his visits to strip clubs in Copenhagen.

Peter Stanford wrote in ''The Guardian''s obituary of Longford that in the late 1980s, the peer was contacted by the solicitor for a young Dutchman, convicted of a drugs offence, sent to Albany prison on the Isle of Wight, who was suffering from AIDS and had been cut off by his family. Longford was the only person to visit the dying man, a gesture repeated in countless episodes that never made headlines, but which brought succour and relief.

Myra Hindley

He gained a reputation for eccentricity, becoming known for his efforts to rehabilitate offenders and in particular campaigning for the parole and release from prison of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley, who had been jailed for life along with Ian Brady in 1966 for the Moors Murders.

Longford's support for Hindley led to the soubriquet ''Lord Wrongford'' from the tabloid press, which largely opposed Hindley being released from prison. It also coincided with Longford's contact with Hindley becoming public knowledge in 1972, when "Lord Porn" was in the midst of the debacle of a much-lampooned anti-pornography crusade against "indecency", giving rise to more allegations of hypocrisy than had already resulted from his tours of sex clubs. In 1977, 11 years after Hindley was convicted of two murders and being an accessory to a third murder, Longford appeared on television and spoke openly of his belief that Hindley should now be considered for parole as she had shown clear signs of progress in prison and now served long enough for the Parole Board to assess her suitability for release from prison. He also supported Hindley's claims that her role in the Moors Murders was merely that of an unwilling accessory, rather than an active participant, and that she had only taken part due to Brady's abuse and threats. These claims were aired in the inaugural episode of '' Brass Tacks'', which featured arguments for and against Hindley being considered for parole. Ann West, the mother of Lesley Ann Downey, spoke of her determination that Hindley should never be released, and openly told viewers that she would kill Hindley if she ever was released.

In 1985, he condemned the Parole Board's decision not to consider Hindley's release for another five years as "barbaric". His campaign for Hindley continued even after she admitted to two more murders in 1986, which further strengthened media and public opinion that any reports of progress by Hindley in prison were nothing more than a ploy to boost her chances of gaining release from prison.

In 1990, Home Secretary David Waddington ruled that "life should mean life" for Hindley, who had been told by earlier Home Secretaries and High Court judges that she would have to serve a minimum of 25 and then 30 years before being considered for parole. Hindley was not informed of the decision until December 1994, and Longford later expressed his "disgust" at this ruling, comparing her imprisonment to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. By this time Hindley, who had initially thought that having "friends in high places" could only help her cause, had cut off all contact and communication with him, now considering him a liability whose "campaigning" was little more than publicity-seeking on his own behalf.

The next three Home Secretaries all agreed with Waddington's ruling. Hindley appealed against her whole life tariff in the High Court in December 1997, November 1998 and March 2000, but each appeal was rejected. Longford maintained that she was a changed woman who was no longer a threat to society, and had qualified for parole. He regularly commented, along with several other Hindley supporters, that she was a "political prisoner" who was being kept in prison for votes, to serve the interests of a succession of Home Secretaries and their respective governments. Home Office files would later reveal that in 1975 Longford had also lobbied various government ministers, including the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, on Brady's behalf, as well. This resulted in Brady obtaining special treatment while remaining in the prison hospital, rather than being returned to the segregation unit. This gave him access to adolescent "youth custody" inmates; he was only removed from this privileged situation in 1982, after he was accused by several underage inmates of sexual assault.

In March 1996, Longford backed up Hindley's claim in an Oxford University magazine that she was still in prison so that the Conservative government – trailing in the opinion polls since the autumn of 1992 – would win more votes. This claim was met with anger by the mothers of two of the Moors Murders victims, including Ann West, who remained at the centre of the campaign to ensure that Hindley was never released, and once again vowed to kill Hindley if she was set free. Longford regularly condemned the media for "manipulating" West and feeding her desire for revenge, being particularly critical of '' The Sun'' newspaper for its "exploitation" of West — referring to her numerous television and newspaper interviews in which she argued against any suggestion of Hindley ever being paroled, often threatening to kill her if she was ever set free. In 1986, Longford reportedly told West that unless she forgave Hindley and Brady, she would not go to heaven when she died. He also commented that he was "tremendously sorry for her, but letting her decide Myra's fate would be ludicrous".

Hindley died in November 2002, having never been paroled.

The story of Longford's campaign to free Hindley was told in the Channel 4 film ''Longford'' in 2006. Longford was played by Jim Broadbent (who won a BAFTA for his role) and Hindley was played by Samantha Morton.

Decriminalisation of homosexuality

In 1956, Longford launched the first Parliamentary debate in support of the Wolfenden Report, which recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality. He had been a staunch public supporter of Lord Montagu and his lover Peter Wildeblood after the two were jailed for breaking anti-gay laws in the early 1950s, and visited them regularly in prison.

In the 1960s, taking the lead in the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales, he still held the view that stated that homosexuality was "nauseating" and that, regardless of any change in the law, it was "utterly wrongful". He was of the belief that homosexuality was something that could be "taught".

In the mid-1980s, Longford was a vocal supporter of the introduction of Section 28 by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and, during the Parliamentary debates, he stated his opinion that homosexuals are "handicapped people". Section 28 became law in 1988, but Longford continued to support it and fought against its repeal when the new Labour government came to power in 1997. Despite his efforts, he was unsuccessful and Section 28 was repealed in 2003.

Longford's highly publicised condemnation of homosexuality in the late 1980s made him a target of comedian Julian Clary, who often satirised him in his stage shows and television