Hastings Bertrand Lees-Smith PC (26 January 1878 – 18 December 1941) was a British Liberal turned Labour politician who was briefly in the cabinet as President of the Board of Education in 1931.

He was educated at Aldenham School, as a cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and Queen's College, Oxford.

[6] Unlike his fellow Northampton MP, Charles McCurdy, Lees-Smith allied with H. H. Asquith rather than David Lloyd George in the Liberal split during the First World War and, as a consequence, was not offered support by the Coalition in the 1918 general election.

Rather than defend Northampton (which had been reduced to one member), he moved to the new Don Valley constituency but lost to a Coalition-supported National Democratic and Labour Party candidate.

[citation needed] He was the member of Parliament who, in July 1917, read Siegfried Sassoon's declaration that the First World War had continued too long and should be ended.

He was a noted speaker on banking and on reform of the House of Lords, about which he wrote several books including Second Chambers in Theory and Practice (1923).

The collapse of the Liberal Party in the 1924 general election meant that Lees-Smith won his seat back,[8] and he was swiftly appointed to a frontbench role.