McGarel Hogg was the name by which the subject of this essay was known in Oxford during the 1920s. At All Souls, after his election as an Examination Fellow in 1931, he was called Hogg. It was as Quintin Hogg that he was elected as MP for the City of Oxford in 1938. At the age of 42, in 1950, he succeeded his father, a former Lord Chancellor, as second Viscount Hailsham. Thirteen years later he reverted to Quintin Hogg, by disclaiming his peerage in an effort to become chosen as the next Conservative leader and Prime Minister after the resignation of Harold Macmillan. When Edward Heath formed his cabinet in 1970, a life peerage, Hailsham of St Marylebone, was gazetted so that Hogg could follow his father to the woolsack. As a cabinet minister, he was known as Hailsham, which is the name by which he is remembered in All Souls, where his fellowships spanned 70 years. In this chapter, which scrutinizes his ideas on conservatism during the 1940s, he will be called Hailsham.

‘Much the best Conservative thinker in politics since the war’, Ian Gilmour judged him in 1992. As leader of the Tory Reform Committee in the 1940s and as Chairman of the Conservative Party in the 1950s, Hailsham was intent on ensuring that the economic, social, political, and personal relationships of post-war Britain kept a semblance of traditional principles. There were other Tory reformers and other party chairmen, but none were so cogent and effective in their writings and speeches. Cyril Falls ranked Hailsham and Aneurin Bevan as the first-class political orators of the 1950s.

Hailsham’s achievement as Party Chairman was outstanding. He took the post in 1957 after the Suez fiasco, when the Conservatives were broken in morale, and mustered their forces for the election victory of 1959. The ideas in Anthony Crosland’s manifesto of 1956, The Future of Socialism, are acknowledged as providing the policy motivations of Harold Wilson’s government of 1964–70 and for James Callaghan’s government of 1976–79; but Hailsham has never had full credit for his rallying of non-socialists. No other conservative parliamentarian was as influential in their ideas before the fall of the Heath government in 1974. Thereafter his mantle was taken by Keith Joseph, whom All Souls had elected as the Prize Fellow in Law in 1946.