Douglas McGarel Hogg, 1st Viscount Hailsham, PC (28 February 1872 – 16 August 1950) was a British lawyer and Conservative politician who twice served as Lord Chancellor, in addition to a number of other Cabinet positions.

Mooted as a possible successor to Stanley Baldwin as party leader for a time in the very early 1930s, he was widely considered to be one of the leading Conservative politicians of his generation.

[2][3] Sir John Simon later wrote of him: "Hogg had all the qualities that go to make a leader at the bar: an accurate grasp of complicated facts, a clear view of the principles of law which had to be applied to them, a sturdy attitude in the face of the situation with which he had to deal, and a manner which was genial and conciliatory with a persuasive force behind it well calculated to win assent from the tribunal he was addressing.

[1] Hogg's son Quintin later recalled that, probably around the time of the Curragh Incident in March 1914 when he was six years old, he had been presented to the adults at the close of a tea party, and had asked "Who is Winston Churchill?"

Churchill, a leading member of the Liberal Cabinet at the time, was one of those apparently threatening some kind of military and naval action against Protestant Ulster; Hogg's brother Ian was then serving with the 4th Hussars at the Curragh.

On the outbreak of war in August 1914 Hogg was cheered by bystanders in a London park, who mistook him for Churchill, to whom he bore a slight physical resemblance.

[4] Hogg was approached to be the Conservative Party candidate for Marylebone, but stood down before the 1918 election rather than fight the sitting member (Sir Samuel Scott) for the nomination.

[1] Hogg therefore began his Commons career on the front bench, and within days had to help pilot through the House the bill which set up the Irish Free State constitution.

Neville Chamberlain wrote that Hogg's speech during the debate which installed MacDonald "made a great impression and heartened up our party immensely".

He was the minister responsible for the arrest and prosecution of Harry Pollitt and a number of other British communists for subversion in October 1925, though credit was generally attributed to the better-known Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks.

In 1928 Austen Chamberlain wrote to one of his sisters about knotty legal issues that he faced at the Foreign Office, over which Hailsham 'was unable to help me to a decision, which if you knew him would alone be sufficient to show you how extremely difficult of solution these problems are'.

[9][10][1] As the parliament ended in May 1929, Austen Chamberlain wrote that Hailsham's judgement was 'I think as good as that of any member of the Cabinet' (Diary Letters, 322, 330).

Sir John Simon identified a number of significant cases in the Lords in which his judgments 'illustrated his power of lucid reasoning and his command of appropriate language': Addie v. Dumbreck (injury to child trespasser, 1929); Tolley v. Fry (defamation, 1931); Swadling v. Cooper (contributory negligence, 1931).

[1] Hailsham was not offered a seat in the small emergency Cabinet of the National Government of August–October 1931, a fact which John Ramsden attributes to his disloyalty to Baldwin in opposition.

[1] After the October 1931 elections, with the Cabinet restored to a larger size, he joined the second National Government as Secretary of State for War and Leader of the House of Lords.

[1] Hailsham was a strong supporter of protectionism (tariffs on goods imported into the British Empire, an aspiration for many Conservatives since Joseph Chamberlain had called for them in 1903).

[1] On 7 June 1935, to his apparent pleasure, Hailsham returned to the Lord Chancellorship under Stanley Baldwin, now prime minister for the third time.

He ruled that there was no case for Lord de Clifford to answer, but also suggested that this mediaeval privilege was obsolete; the procedure was abolished in the Criminal Justice Act 1948.

[12] On 14 October 1940, Hailsham was having dinner at the Carlton Club with his son Quintin, who was about to depart for active service as an army officer in North Africa.

The club was hit by a bomb, and observers, including the diarist Harold Nicolson, likened the sight of Quintin carrying his disabled father from the building to Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back from the sack of Troy (the event, and the classical allusion, are also mentioned in Churchill's History of the Second World War).

[1][3] John Ramsden suggests that rapid success, coming to a man who entered politics at the late age of fifty, made him "overplay his hand" in the events of 1929–31, even though as a peer by then he could not reasonably hope to be prime minister.

William Bridgeman recorded in his diary that Hogg's success had not impaired "his great ability in debate, though it did I think interfere with his political judgement … He never suffered a reverse until the defeat of the party in 1929, an experience which would have been beneficial if he had had it.

[15] Hogg and his wife had two sons:[14] Elizabeth suffered a stroke in 1923, and died in May 1925, shortly after they had visited the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park together.

Quintin, then aged seventeen, had to answer many of the condolence letters himself, and later recorded that for four years afterwards he could hear his father in his bedroom at night "literally shouting with agony".

[16] On 3 January 1929, Lord Hailsham, as he now was, married a second time, to Mildred Margaret (d. 1964), daughter of Edward Parker Dew and widow of Alfred Clive Lawrence.