He is perhaps best remembered today as Winston Churchill's greatest personal and political friend until Birkenhead's death aged 58 from pneumonia caused by cirrhosis of the liver.

Announced initially as his father's son, he spoke all over Lancashire, stirring up Orange opinion against the Liberal policy of Irish home rule.

[6] In 1907 he was asked to give an opinion on a proposed libel action by the Lever Brothers against newspapers owned by Lord Northcliffe concerning the latter's allegations of a conspiracy to raise the price of soap by means of a 'soap trust'.

He checked into the Savoy and, after working all night reading a pile of papers nearly four feet thick and consuming a bottle of champagne and two dozen oysters, Smith wrote a one-sentence opinion: "There is no answer to this action in libel, and the damages must be enormous".

In February 1908, Smith was made a King's Counsel by Lord Loreburn, on the same day as his friend and rival from Wadham College, future Home Secretary Sir John Simon.

This prompted G. K. Chesterton to write a satirical poem, "Antichrist, Or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode", which asked if Breton sailors, Russian peasants and Christians evicted by the Turks would know or care of what happened to the Anglican Church of Wales, and answered the question with the line "Chuck it, Smith".

Smith had joined the Territorial Army by commission into the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars, in which Churchill was already an officer, in 1913,[4] and was a captain in the regiment[12] before the outbreak of the First World War.

[15] As Attorney General, it was his responsibility to lead the prosecution for the Crown in major cases such as the trial in 1916 of the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement for treason.

[14] Sir Roger had been captured after landing from a Kaiserliche Marine U-boat on Banna Strand in Tralee Bay in north County Kerry, south-west Ireland, just a few days before the Easter Rising in late April 1916.

Following abolition of the Walton seat in constituency boundary changes, Smith was returned at the December 1918 general election for neighbouring West Derby Division, only to be elevated to the House of Lords two months later.

[20] The Morning Post commented that his appointment as Attorney-General had been amusing but that his further promotion was "carrying a joke beyond the limits of pleasantry", while the King urged Lloyd George to reconsider.

[21] Birkenhead proved an excellent Lord Chancellor, but tales of his drunkenness begin from this time, very likely as he grew bored with the job and as it dawned on him that he had probably ruled himself out from the premiership by accepting a peerage.

[22] That year, in the House of Lords debate on the Amritsar Massacre, he courageously denounced Tories who declared General Dyer (the responsible officer) a hero.

His support for this, and his warm relations with the Irish nationalist leaders Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, angered some of his former Unionist associates, notably Sir Edward Carson.

[26] Also in 1921, he was responsible for the House of Lords rejecting a proposal, put forward by Frederick Alexander Macquisten, MP for Argyllshire, to criminalise lesbianism.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty, the attempt to go to war with Turkey over Chanak (which was later vetoed by the governments of the Dominions) and a general whiff of moral and financial corruption which had come to surround the Coalition were all hallmarks of his tenure in office.

A scandal erupted in 1922 when it became known that Lloyd George, through the agency of Maundy Gregory,[30] had awarded honours and titles such as a baronetcy to rich businessmen in return for cash in the range of £10,000 and more.

On 11 December Birkenhead was forced to apologise ("frigidly received" by the Lords, according to The Times) and Lady Curzon retaliated by cutting him at a ball, but as she remarked to her husband in a letter, he was "too drunk to notice" the snub.

[36][37] Even a famous speech, the Rectorial Address to the University of Glasgow on 7 November 1923,[38] in which Birkenhead told undergraduates that the world still offered "glittering prizes" to those with "stout hearts and sharp swords", now seemed out of kilter with the less aggressive and more self-consciously moral style of politics advocated by the new generation of Conservative politicians such as Stanley Baldwin and Edward Wood, the future Lord Halifax.

Birkenhead regarded the League of Nations as idealistic nonsense, and thought that international relations should be guided by "self-interest", lest Britain decline like Imperial Spain.

[39] After the December 1923 General Election, at which Baldwin lost his majority and a hung Parliament was returned, Birkenhead briefly intrigued for another Lloyd George coalition government.

In order to discourage them from associating with Lloyd George, Baldwin quickly invited former coalitionists Austen Chamberlain, Birkenhead and Balfour to join the Shadow Cabinet.

[42] A 1924 entry in Evelyn Waugh's diary states that an English High Court judge, presiding in a sodomy case, sought advice on sentencing from Lord Birkenhead.

Beaverbrook, in so far as can be discerned from the limited surviving evidence in letters, appears to have provided a cover for sexual liaisons between the two of them, and for womanising by others of their social circle.

Bennett replied that the character was not based on any single person and anyway that it was not for Birkenhead, who had recently published a potboiler called Famous Trials, to criticise others for writing books to make money.

[44] Despite winning a large majority at the 1924 election, Baldwin formed a broad new (second) government by appointing former coalitionists such as Birkenhead, Austen Chamberlain and former Liberal Winston Churchill to senior Cabinet posts; this was to discourage them from associating with Lloyd George to revive the 1916-22 Coalition.

He wrote to The Times on 19 May, describing Asquith as the "greatest living Oxonian", but his support may have done more harm than good, because of his association with the discredited Lloyd George Coalition, and because of his open scepticism both of religion and of the League of Nations.

It was quipped that Asquith was "a warming-pan” for Birkenhead's views (a learned Oxford joke, referring to the legend that the Old Pretender had been an impostor baby rather than a rightful heir to the throne).

Beatrice Webb recorded (diary 14 March 1928) him remarking "the future Coalition" when he saw Churchill, Lloyd George and Birkenhead chatting at the end of a state dinner.

His role in the Anglo-Irish treaty negotiations was featured in the penultimate episode of the 1981 BBC Wales biographical series The Life and Times of David Lloyd George,where he was portrayed by Morris Perry.