Lord Sudeley with me at the Traditional Britain Group Conference, 2015

The death has been announced of Merlin Charles Sainthill Hanbury-Tracy, 7th Baron Sudeley, at the age of eighty-three. Lord Sudeley was President of the Traditional Britain Group of which I am a Vice-President.

Lord Sudeley succeeded to his peerage at the age of two. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he saw National Service in the Scots Guards. Taking his seat aged twenty-one, he completed thirty-nine years of service in the House of Lords, where he was regular in his attendance and introduced several measures, before being ejected with the majority of hereditary peers under Tony Blair’s so-called “reforms”, which he opposed strongly. His book “Peers through the mists of time” was a conservative history of the House of Lords and a contribution to the upholding of the hereditary nobiliary principle, which he rightly saw as integral to our nation and her monarchy.

Lord Sudeley was for many years a member of the Conservative Monday Club and became its President between 1991 and 2008. His traditional Conservative views put him at odds with the modernising and leftist tendencies of the party leadership in the post-Thatcher years. Under Ian Duncan-Smith the leadership required Conservative MPs to resign their membership of the Club, sought to censor the Club’s discussion of policies relating to race, and also forbade Conservative MPs from contributing to the magazine Right Now! of which Lord Sudeley was a Patron, after an article in that magazine drew attention to Nelson Mandela’s terrorist past.

As a man of integrity, Lord Sudeley did not hesitate to express his opinions, however unpopular these might prove, and was ready to support them with insight and considerable intellectual depth. He supported slavery, arguing that one should care far more for a person in the context of possessory ownership than in mere employment. He wrote on his ancestors and the family seat, Toddington Manor, and also published short stories and satire.

To those he did not know, Lord Sudeley could appear reticent, but once one touched upon a subject which interested him he came alive and revealed an ingenious, unconventional intellect that could easily have suited him for academic life. Indeed, he did undertake some lecturing at the University of Bristol earlier in his career.

He was married three times, but had no children, and the barony has been inherited by his fourth cousin once removed.