Sir Edward Richard George Heath, commonly known as Ted Heath, was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975. Heath also served for 51 years as a Member of Parliament from 1950 to 2001. Outside politics, Heath was a yachtsman, a musician, and an author.
The Profumo affair was a major scandal in British politics during the early 1960s. John Profumo, the 46-year-old Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan's Conservative government, had an extramarital affair with the 19-year-old model Christine Keeler beginning in 1961. Profumo denied the affair in a statement to the House of Commons in 1963; weeks later, a police investigation proved that he had lied. The scandal severely damaged the credibility of Macmillan's government, and Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister in October 1963, citing ill health. The fallout contributed to the Conservative government's defeat by the Labour Party in the 1964 general election.
Thomas George Thomas, 1st Viscount Tonypandy, was a British politician who served as a member of parliament (MP) and Speaker of the House of Commons from 1976 to 1983. He was elected as a Labour MP.
John Jeremy Thorpe was a British politician who served as the Member of Parliament for North Devon from 1959 to 1979, and as leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 to 1976. In May 1979 he was tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend Norman Scott, a former model. Thorpe was acquitted on all charges, but the case, and the furore surrounding it, ended his political career.
Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, 1st Earl of Midlothian, was a British Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from March 1894 to June 1895. Between the death of his father, in 1851, and the death of his grandfather, the 4th Earl of Rosebery, in 1868, he was known by the courtesy title of Lord Dalmeny.
Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden,, also known as R. A. Butler and familiarly known from his initials as Rab, was a prominent British Conservative Party politician; he was effectively deputy prime minister to Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, although he only held the official title for a brief period in 1962–63. He was one of his party's leaders in promoting the post-war consensus through which the major parties largely agreed on the main points of domestic policy until the 1970s; it is sometimes known as "Butskellism" from a fusion of his name with that of his Labour counterpart, Hugh Gaitskell.
Charles Anthony Raven Crosland was a British Labour Party politician and author. A social democrat on the right wing of the Labour Party, he was a prominent socialist intellectual. His influential book The Future of Socialism (1956) argued against many Marxist notions and the traditional Labour Party doctrine that expanding public ownership was essential to make socialism work, arguing instead for prioritising the end of poverty and improving public services. He offered positive alternatives to both the right wing and left wing of the Labour Party.
Abd al-Ilah of Hejaz, was a cousin and brother-in-law of King Ghazi of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq and was regent for his nephew King Faisal II, from 4 April 1939 to 23 May 1953, when Faisal came of age. Abd al-Ilah also held the title of Crown Prince of Iraq from 1943 to 1953.
Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, was a British Labour Party economist and politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947. He shaped Labour Party foreign policy in the 1930s, opposing pacifism; promoting rearmament against the German threat; and strongly opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Dalton served in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet; after the Dunkirk evacuation he was Minister of Economic Warfare, and established Special Operations Executive. As Chancellor, he pushed his policy of cheap money too hard, and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947. His political position was already in jeopardy in 1947 when he, seemingly inadvertently, revealed a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his budget speech. Prime Minister Clement Attlee accepted his resignation; Dalton later returned to the cabinet in relatively minor positions.
William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp,, styled Viscount Elmley until 1891, was a British Liberal politician. He was Governor of New South Wales between 1899 and 1901, a member of the Liberal administrations of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H. H. Asquith between 1905 and 1915, and leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords between 1924 and 1931. When political enemies threatened to make his homosexuality public, he resigned from office to go into exile. Lord Beauchamp is generally considered to be the model for the character Lord Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited.
Albert Victor Grayson was an English socialist politician of the early 20th century. An Independent Labour Party Member of Parliament from 1907 to 1910, Grayson is most notable for his sensational by-election victory at Colne Valley, and unexplained disappearance in 1920.
Sir Robert Vidal Rhodes James was a British historian and Conservative Member of Parliament. Born in India, he was educated in England and attended the University of Oxford. From 1955 to 1964, he was a clerk of the House of Commons. He meanwhile wrote a number of biographical and historical books. He then moved to academia and had been elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 1965. He was Director of the Institute for the Study of International Organisation at the University of Sussex (1968–1973) and then Principal Officer in the Executive Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations (1973–1976). He moved from behind the scenes by being elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Cambridge in the 1976 by-election. He spent most of his parliamentary career on the backbenches, apart from serving as a Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Foreign Office (1979–1982). He was knighted in 1991 and stepped down as an MP the following year. During his time as an MP, he continued to author multiple books and maintained his academic standing through visiting professorships and his Oxford fellowship.
Alan Tindal Lennox-Boyd, 1st Viscount Boyd of Merton, CH, PC, DL, was a British Conservative politician.
Sir Thomas Galloway Dunlop Galbraith, known as Tam Galbraith, was a Scottish Unionist politician.
Sir Charles Fletcher Fletcher-Cooke QC MP was a British politician and lawyer whom served as the constitutional adviser to Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah.
Sir Ian Macdonald Horobin was a British Conservative Party politician, poet, and veteran of the First and Second World Wars. Horobin served as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Power from 1958 to 1959, but stood down from politics shortly before his conviction for indecent assault, for which he served four years in prison.
George Arthur Maurice Hamilton-Gordon, 2nd Baron Stanmore, was a British Liberal politician.
Captain Sir Harold Malcolm Bullock, 1st Baronet, was a British soldier and Conservative Party politician.
Colonel John Robert Jermain Macnamara was a British Conservative Party politician and officer of the British Army who was killed while fighting in Italy during the Second World War. He was the last sitting MP to die in combat.
