Lord Hooson, who has died aged 86, was, as Emlyn Hooson, Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire for 17 years and leader of the Welsh party; its leading right-winger at Westminster, he was the only Liberal to vote against Britain joining the European Community.
Hooson combined his political career with a successful practice at the Bar. He defended dozens of killers — most notoriously the Moors murderer Ian Brady — becoming ever more convinced that the death penalty would not have deterred them. When Duncan Sandys moved to reintroduce it because of a sharp increase in murder convictions, Hooson told him this was because juries were now readier to convict.
Otherwise, Hooson was a legal conservative. He opposed the introduction of majority verdicts and, in the Lords, resisted far-reaching reforms proposed by the Conservative Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay. He feared they would undermine the independence of the judiciary and the Bar.
Eloquent in Welsh and English, Hooson was a committed devolutionist, promoting several Bills for Home Rule and to entrench the status of Welsh. He sent his daughters to London’s only Welsh-speaking school, and chaired its governors.
Hooson the QC defended nationalists accused of terrorism, but Hooson the politician trenchantly opposed Welsh extremism. In 1968 he demanded concerted action to halt Welsh terrorists after a series of bombings. After 12 Welsh students were jailed in 1970 for invading a High Court case in London, Hooson said the Welsh were fed up with people who broke the law then whined about the consequences.
Hooson’s career at the Bar had its political repercussions. In 1970 he appeared for the Ministry of Defence at a public inquiry over plans to move its experimental range from Shoeburyness to Pembrey, near Carmarthen. Local Liberals, who hotly opposed the plan, were aghast. In February 1974, he had to pull out of a lucrative two-month bank robbery case at the Old Bailey when Edward Heath called a snap election.
The son of a Denbighshire hill farmer, Hooson moved to the heart of the Welsh establishment when he married the daughter of Sir George Hamer, Montgomeryshire’s most influential figure socially — he was Lord Lieutenant — and politically.
It was hard at times to see what Hooson had in common with his party’s radical mainstream. He saw Labour as the enemy, and after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, he upset David Steel by telling constituents he could see nothing wrong with assisting immigrants who sought repatriation. Yet he had no truck with Margaret Thatcher, saying in 1978: “People are superficially attracted by her violent swing to the Right, but she cannot even work with Conservatives like Mr Heath and Peter Walker.”
After Liberal losses in the 1970 election, Hooson told the Liberal Assembly that the public wanted a middle-of-the-road party, blaming Jo Grimond and Jeremy Thorpe for trying to take it Leftward. When the Liberals merged with the SDP in 1988, he backed Alan Beith for the leadership against the less cautious Paddy Ashdown.
Hooson attracted abuse from party activists, particularly the Young Liberals who at one conference waved sticks of rhubarb at him when he opposed sanctions on South Africa. Yet they were allies in opposing the Vietnam War, and the Young Liberals’ leader, Peter Hain, relied on Hooson’s advice when forced to apologise to Edward Short, Leader of the Commons, for suggesting he was implicated in the Poulson affair.
Hooson opposed both Grimond’s readiness to keep the 1964 Labour government in power, and the Lib-Lab Pact concluded with James Callaghan by Steel. But the leader he trusted least was Jeremy Thorpe. When Grimond retired in 1967, Hooson stood against Thorpe partly on policy grounds but also because of a deep and, as events would prove, shrewd distrust of Thorpe’s character.
He reckoned his suspicions justified when, in 1971, the former male model Norman Scott arrived at Westminster and claimed to Hooson, Steel and Lord Byers that Thorpe had had a homosexual relationship with him. Thorpe denied the allegations but Hooson conducted an investigation that triggered a party inquiry. Although this cleared Thorpe, Hooson told Thorpe he should consider resigning the leadership and his seat and asked another Liberal MP, Peter Bessell, if he would back him for the job should Thorpe quit. Thorpe got to hear of this, and accused Hooson of running around “trying to stir up something”.
Thorpe was forced out in 1976 after the affair became public and subsequently tried for incitement and conspiracy to murder Scott. Bessell testified that Hooson — who was not called as a witness — knew of “retainer payments” of up to £700 made to Scott, and feared he might be accused of a cover-up. The court also heard a tape recording in which David Holmes, one of Thorpe’s co-defendants, told Bessell that Hooson had been “firmly sat on” for trying to force Thorpe out. Thorpe was cleared.
Hooson was sometime Liberal spokesman on the law, home affairs and defence, and vice-chairman of the Nato assembly’s political committee. Despite his misgivings over Europe, he argued for Britain to adopt a European, rather than an imperial, defence policy.
Hugh Emlyn Hooson was born on March 26 1925 and educated at Denbigh Grammar School. After war service with the Royal Navy he studied at agricultural college before deciding to go for the Bar. He read Law at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, becoming president of its debating union, and was called to the Bar in 1949 at Gray’s Inn, where he became a bencher in 1968 and treasurer in 1986.
At the Bar, Hooson earned a reputation as a cool, clear thinker and lucid advocate. In 1960, at 35, he became the youngest Silk for many years. He practised on the Wales and Chester circuit (as its leader from 1971 to 1974), and chaired the Flint and Merioneth Quarter Sessions, until in 1971 he became Recorder of Merthyr Tydfil and Swansea.
In December 1965 Hooson was appointed to lead Ian Brady’s defence at Chester Assizes; Brady was charged with murdering Lesley Anne Downey (10), John Kilbride (12) and Edward Evans (17), (Myra Hindley was also charged with killing Lesley Anne and John). When the trial opened the following April, the evidence left Hooson little to work with . Brady admitted having wielded the axe against Evans, and although Hooson insisted there was only the “flimsiest evidence” against him over the deaths of the two children, Brady and Hindley were convicted on all counts and sentenced to life; Brady remains behind bars.
Hooson fought his first elections at Conway, part of Lloyd George’s old seat, in 1950 and 1951, coming third. Later, doubtless with his father-in-law’s assistance, he became the anointed heir for the seat held since 1929 by the Liberal leader, Clement Davies.
After Davies’s death, Hooson achieved a by-election triumph in May 1962, trebling the Liberal majority in the wake of Eric Lubbock’s capture of Orpington; farmers carried him shoulder-high through Welshpool. Four years later, after he had been left Wales’s only Liberal MP by Roderic Bowen’s defeat at Carmarthen, Hooson persuaded Welsh Liberals to form their own party, and became its leader.
When, in March 1977, the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, who had lost his party’s majority in Parliament, approached the Liberals to agree a pact, Hooson sought to persuade the party leader David Steel to reject the offer. Though Steel ignored his advice, Hooson made the best of it, later describing 1977-78 as a time when “ a genuine attempt was made to put the interests of the country first”. But he was keen for the Liberals to extract themselves and “get at arm’s length with the Government” as an election neared.
Steel achieved this, but while the party survived, Hooson did not. At the 1979 General Election his Tory opponent Delwyn Williams ousted him by 1,593 votes; the seat had been Liberal for 99 years.
In June 1979, Hooson was made a life peer; in the Lords, he spoke authoritatively on the law and drugs trafficking. In 1980 he chaired a consortium which bid for the Wales and West television franchise. In 1990 , as the only non-executive director of Laura Ashley, the troubled fashion and fabrics company which had its factory at Newtown, he took part in a rescue involving the Bank of England and 15 other banks.
Hooson was president of the Royal National Eisteddfod in 1965 and 2001, of the Llangollen International Eisteddfod from 1987 to 1993, and was White Bard of the Gorsedd in 1966.
He was at various times president of Wales International, chairman of the Parliamentary Groups for World Government and the Severn River Crossing, and a member of the Bar Council and the ITV Advisory Council.
Emlyn Hooson married Shirley Hamer in 1950. They had two daughters.
Lord Hooson, born March 26 1925, died February 21 2012
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