39 Facts About Stephen Hastings

Sir Stephen Lewis Edmonstone Hastings was a British Conservative politician who was elected Member of Parliament for Mid Bedfordshire in a 1960 by-election and held it until he stood down at the 1983 general election.

Stephen Hastings was a soldier, MI6 operative, Master of Foxhounds and author.

The son of a Southern Rhodesian farmer, Hastings had visited the country only briefly as a young child, but he grew up with tales of the veldt and the farm.

Stephen Hastings saw the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979, which created an independent Republic of Zimbabwe and led to Robert Mugabe's election as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe in 1980, as a disaster caused by "unnecessary deference to the delusion of the Commonwealth, the Afro-Asian lobby and to the Americans by a series of British governments".

Stephen Hastings was born at Knightsbridge in Central London, son of Major Lewis Aloysius Macdonald Stephen Hastings and Meriel Eda St John, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Neil Edmonstone, of the 4th Hussars.

Lewis Stephen Hastings had run away to Southern Rhodesia at the age of 17 after leaving his school, going on to prospect for diamonds, serve in the Cape Mounted Police, and operate as a political organizer; after the First World War, he bought a farm there, founded the Southern Rhodesia Tobacco Growers' Association, and became an MP and war correspondent for the BBC.

Stephen Hastings was proud of his Scottish ancestry, among whose relations were the MacDonalds of Sleat.

Stephen Hastings had an abiding affection for his cousin the historian and journalist, Max Hastings.

Stephen Hastings learned to ride in Windsor Great Park, becoming an accomplished horseman.

Stephen Hastings attended Durnford School in Dorset and Eton College.

At Eton he managed to combine an undistinguished academic career, and with the clandestine help of his grandmother and her chauffeur, to engage in racing as an amateur jockey and, more importantly for his future, Stephen Hastings began a lifelong love for steeplechasing and fox hunting.

Stephen Hastings arrived in the newly liberated Paris in August 1944, then was dropped with a wireless operator and interpreter behind enemy lines in the Apennines as chief liaison officer to the Italian partisans.

Stephen Hastings found them demoralised and largely non-existent, but successfully trained and armed them, despite internal conflicts and frequent enemy attempts to capture him.

Stephen Hastings was constantly to the fore, coolly directing and encouraging his men while under constant machine-gun and mortar fire, according to the citation for his Military Cross.

Stephen Hastings thereupon convinced the German officer in charge that it would be in his best interest to provide them with a fine seaside villa and supplies of champagne for the weeks that it would take the Allies to arrive.

Stephen Hastings noted that Petacci's skirt had been pinned to her stockings to prevent her underwear from being revealed.

Stephen Hastings considered this to be a perfect example of the often paradoxical delicacy of the Italian temperament.

Stephen Hastings found time to assemble a scratch pack - the Brindisi Vale Hounds - which hunted a reported, but probably non-existent, fox.

Stephen Hastings was spared a posting to Nagasaki by a friend finding him a job in the economic division of the control commission in Austria, a post for which, he admitted at his interview, he had no relevant qualifications.

Stephen Hastings was then sent to a former Wehrmacht training centre, above the Judenburg in Styria, where he captained the British troops' ski-racing team but broke a leg during a competition against the French.

Stephen Hastings turned down an offer from Gillette and was refused a job by the BBC.

The unproven imputations put forward in the book Spycatcher, in which Stephen Hastings was portrayed as participating in an attempt to destabilise the Harold Wilson government were always vehemently denied by him.

Stephen Hastings retained his seat in the subsequent general elections in 1964,1966,1970, February 1974, October 1974, and 1979, but stood down at the 1983 general election, when he was succeeded by fellow-Conservative Sir Nicholas Lyell.

Stephen Hastings quickly established his credentials on the Right of the party, becoming a stalwart of the Monday Club and an ally of the likes of Julian Amery and Ronald Bell.

Stephen Hastings served on various backbench committees, becoming a member of the executive of the 1922 Committee and vice-chairman of the Conservative backbench Foreign Affairs Committee.

Stephen Hastings was often embroiled in controversy concerning Communist infiltration.

In 1986 Stephen Hastings successfully sued The Observer newspaper for libel following allegations that he had been one of two Conservative MPs involved in an MI5 plot to oust Harold Wilson.

Stephen Hastings remained a friend of Thatcher after his retirement from the Commons in 1983.

Outside his parliamentary duties, Stephen Hastings continued to ride, hunting regularly with the Fitzwilliam and other hunts.

Stephen Hastings had maintained his lifelong love of racing and each evening before dinner, a glass of champagne in hand, he would watch the races of the day, prerecorded by his butler.

Stephen Hastings was chairman of the Peterborough Cathedral Development and Preservation Trust and helped raise millions of pounds for the cathedral's restoration.

Stephen Hastings was patron of 32 livings, and took his duty to help provide priests for his parishes seriously.

Stephen Hastings was an accomplished painter, a fine sculptor, and wrote two books, The Murder of TSR2 and a well-received autobiography, The Drums of Memory.

Stephen Hastings regularly skied in Switzerland until he was in his ninth decade, and hunted with the Fitzwilliam over forty times in the year before his death.

Stephen Hastings married first, in 1948, Harriet Tomlin, with whom he had a son Neil and a daughter Carola.

Stephen Hastings married secondly, in 1975, Elizabeth Anne Marie Gabrielle, the former Lady Naylor-Leyland.

Lady Stephen Hastings was born the younger daughter of the 2nd and last Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent and Joyce Langdale of Houghton Hall, West Riding, Yorkshire, who secondly married Thomas Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 10th and last Earl Fitzwilliam.

Stephen Hastings was succeeded in her stewardship of the Fitzwilliam heritage by her son, Philip Naylor-Leyland, 4th Baronet.

Sir Stephen Hastings died on 10 January 2005 at Stibbington House, Cambridgeshire, from oesophageal cancer.