Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford

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.

Pakenham at his wedding in 1931

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.[10] 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.[4] 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.[11]

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 that year he was created Baron Pakenham, of Cowley in the City of Oxford, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom,[12] 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".[13] 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.

On television discussion series After Dark in 1988, more here

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,[14] despite the fact that Wilson had little respect for him and once remarked that he had the mental age of 12.[4] 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.[4][15] In 1972 he was created a Knight of the Garter.[16]

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.[17][18]

New Bridge set up Inside Time in 1990, the only national newspaper for the UK's prison population. As of 2014, novelist and journalist Rachel Billington, Longford's daughter, worked at the title one day a week.[19][20] 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.[21]

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 labeled 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.

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.[30]

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".[31] He considered that homosexuality was something that can be taught.[32]

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".[33] 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. It was repealed in 2003.

Longford also opposed the Labour government's plans to equalise the age of consent for gay men (at that time 18) with that of heterosexual men (16), and in a 1998 House of Lords debate he remarked that:

...if someone seduced my daughter, it would be damaging and horrifying but not fatal. She would recover, marry and have lots of children... On the other hand, if some elderly, or not so elderly, schoolmaster seduced one of my sons and taught him to be a homosexual, he would ruin him for life. That is the fundamental distinction.[34]

The age of consent for gay men was equalised at 16 in 2000.

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 appearances.[35]

Under the House of Lords Act 1999, the majority of hereditary peers lost the privilege of a seat and right to vote in the House of Lords. However, Longford was one of four individuals who were hereditary peers of the first creation (in his case 1st Baron Pakenham). As such, he was created a life peer, and remained in the Lords as Baron Pakenham of Cowley, of Cowley in the County of Oxfordshire.[36] At the age of 93, he became the second-oldest person to be granted a peerage (after Lord Maenan).

Known for his interest in Irish history, he wrote a number of books on the topic. Peace By Ordeal: An Account from First-Hand Sources of the Negotiation and Signature of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, published in 1935, is arguably his best-known work, which documents the negotiations of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 between Irish and British representatives. His account uses primary sources from the time, and is widely recognised as the definitive account of this aspect of Irish history.[37] Longford came to greatly admire Éamon de Valera and was chosen as the co-author of his official biography Éamon de Valera, which was published in 1970, co-written with Thomas P. O'Neill. He campaigned for decades to have the Hugh Lane bequest pictures restored to Dublin, and with Lord Moyne and Sir Denis Mahon, brokered a compromise sharing agreement in 1959.[38]

At Oxford, Longford met his wife, Elizabeth Harman, an undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall. Their marriage produced four sons and four daughters, followed by 26 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren.

• 1. Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Pakenham (b. 27 August 1932), writer; previously married to Hugh Fraser and had six children, was married to the late Harold Pinter until his death
• 2. Thomas Frank Dermot Pakenham, 8th Earl of Longford (b. 14 August 1933), historian; married with issue
• 3. Hon. Patrick Maurice Pakenham (17 April 1937 – 8 June 2005[39]), barrister; married Mary Plummer, three children
• 4. Judith Elizabeth Pakenham (14 August 1940 – 18 September 2018), writer; previously married to Alexander John Kazantzis, two children
• 5. Lady Rachel Mary Pakenham (b. 11 April 1942), writer; married to director Kevin Billington, three children
• 6. Hon. Sir Michael Aidan Pakenham (b. 3 November 1943), diplomat; married to Meta Landreth Doak, two children
• 7. Lady Catherine Rose Pakenham (28 February 1946 – 11 August 1969), journalist; died in a car accident, unmarried.
• 8. Hon. Kevin John Toussaint Pakenham[40] (1 November 1947 – 19 July 2020), banker;[41] married to Ruth Jackson,[42] then Claire Hoare, then Ronke Phillips; six children.[43]

Longford died in August 2001 at the age of 95, and was cremated at Mortlake Crematorium.[44]

His wife, Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford, died in October 2002 at the age of 96.[45] She was the author of Victoria R.I. (1964), a biography of Queen Victoria, published in the US as Born to Succeed. She also wrote a two-volume biography of the Duke of Wellington, and a volume of memoirs, The Pebbled Shore. She stood for Parliament as Labour candidate for Cheltenham in the 1950 general election.

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.[3]

The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said of Longford after his death: "He was a great man of passionate integrity and humanity, and a great reformer committed to modernising the law, while also caring deeply for individuals."[6]

• The Longford Lectures
• The Longford Prize

The Longford Trust celebrates the achievements and continues the work of Longford. It was established in 2002 by friends and admirers to further the goals he pursued, particularly in the field of social and prison reform. The Longford Trust has a remarkable 85% success rate with its work and campaigns.[46][47] Each year the Trust hosts a lecture, part of a series inaugurated in 2002, chaired every year by Jon Snow. It also bestows The Longford Prize to highly commended individuals, groups and organisations in the field of penal reform.[2]

• Longford (2006): Longford's efforts to obtain parole for Moors murderer Myra Hindley were dramatised in a Channel 4 film, with Longford portrayed by Jim Broadbent, Samantha Morton as Myra Hindley, Lindsay Duncan as Lady Longford and Andy Serkis as Ian Brady.

• Stanford, Peter (2003). The Outcast's Outcast: A Biography of Lord Longford. Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing. pp. 512. ISBN 0-7509-3248-1.
• Fraser, Antonia (2015), My History: A Memoir of Growing Up, New York: Doubleday. [Account, both personal and political, by a daughter of Pakenham.]  

• Longford Trust
• New Bridge Foundation
• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by the Earl of Longford
• "Campaigner Lord Longford dies". BBC News article dated Friday, 3 August 2001
• "Lord Longford: Aristocratic moral crusader". BBC News obituary dated Friday, 3 August 2001
• "Tributes to humanist peer". BBC News article dated Friday, 3 August 2001
• Lord Longford. Guardian obituary by Peter Stanford dated Monday, 6 August 2001
• Announcement of his taking the oath for the first time as Lord Pakenham of Cowley, House of Lords Minute of Proceedings, 17 November 1999
• Recognition of his work on the Hugh Lane bequest
• Newspaper clippings about Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• Portrait of Frank Pakenham in the UK Parliamentary Collections