A member of an old, landed Anglo-Irish family, the Pakenhams (who became Earls of Longford), he was one of the few aristocratic hereditary peers ever to serve in a senior capacity within a Labour government.

[11][12] Born in London to an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, he was the second son of Thomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of Longford in the Peerage of Ireland.

Despite having failed to be awarded a scholarship, he graduated with a first-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and became a don at Christ Church.

After only four months at the Colonial Office, he was removed from the post for failing to master his brief,[citation needed] and again became Lord Privy Seal in April 1966.

Wilson often talked about sacking Longford from his government, which is believed by some to have led to Longford's resignation as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords in January 1968 – though the actual occasion of his resignation was the failure of Education Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker to agree to the raising of the school-leaving age.

[20] Longford began visiting prisoners in the 1930s when he was a city councillor in Oxford, and continued to do so every week, all around the country, until shortly before his death in 2001.

Among the thousands he befriended and helped were a small number of individuals who had committed the most notorious crimes, including child murderer Myra Hindley.

[25] Longford was a leading figure in the Nationwide Festival of Light of 1971, protesting against the commercial exploitation of sex and violence, and advocating the teaching of Christ as the key to recovering moral stability in the nation.

His anti-pornography campaigning made him the subject of derision and he was labelled by the press as Lord Porn when he and former prison doctor Christine Temple-Saville set out on a wide-ranging tour of sex industry establishments in the early 1970s to compile a self-funded report.

Peter Stanford wrote in The Guardian's obituary of Longford that in the late 1980s, the peer was contacted by the solicitor for a young Dutchman, convicted of a drugs offence, sent to Albany prison on the Isle of Wight, who was suffering from AIDS and had been cut off by his family.

Longford was the only person to visit the dying man, a gesture repeated in countless episodes that never made headlines, but which brought succour and relief.

It also coincided with Longford's contact with Hindley becoming public knowledge in 1972,[26] when "Lord Porn" was in the midst of the debacle of a much-lampooned anti-pornography crusade against "indecency", giving rise to more allegations of hypocrisy than had already resulted from his tours of sex clubs.

He also supported Hindley's claims that her role in the Moors Murders was merely that of an unwilling accessory, rather than an active participant, and that she had only taken part due to Brady's abuse and threats.

[28] By this time Hindley, who had initially thought that having "friends in high places" could only help her cause, had cut off all contact and communication with him, now considering him a liability whose "campaigning" was little more than publicity-seeking on his own behalf.

[30] In March 1996, Longford backed up Hindley's claim in an Oxford University magazine that she was still in prison so that the Conservative government – trailing in the opinion polls since the autumn of 1992 – would win more votes.

[31] Longford regularly condemned the media - especially The Sun newspaper - for its "exploitation" of Ann West, who frequently opposed any suggestion of Hindley being paroled, often threatening to kill her if she was ever set free.

In 1956, Longford launched the first Parliamentary debate in support of the Wolfenden Report, which recommended the decriminalisation of private and consensual homosexual acts between men over the age of 21.

He had been a staunch public supporter of Lord Montagu and his lover Peter Wildeblood after the two were jailed for breaking anti-gay laws in the early 1950s, and visited them regularly in prison.

[36][37] In the mid-1980s, Longford was a vocal supporter of the introduction of Section 28 by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and, during the Parliamentary debates, he stated his opinion that homosexuals are "handicapped people".

Longford's highly publicised condemnation of homosexuality in the late 1980s made him a target of comedian Julian Clary, who often satirised him in his stage shows and television appearances.

[39] Longford also opposed any attempts to lower the age of consent for homosexual acts below 21; in 1977 and in 1994, he spoke against lowering it to 18, claiming that "the years of 18 and 19 are [...] the years when the destiny of young men may be decided for life" and that people of that age could have too easily been seduced into a homosexual lifestyle; in the early years of Tony Blair's Ministry, he criticized plans to equalise the age of consent for gay men (at that time 18) with that of heterosexual men (16), remarking in a 1998 House of Lords debate that: ...if someone seduced my daughter, it would be damaging and horrifying but not fatal.

Peace By Ordeal: An Account from First-Hand Sources of the Negotiation and Signature of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, published in 1935, is arguably his best-known work.

He campaigned for decades to have the Hugh Lane bequest pictures restored to Dublin, and with Lord Moyne and Sir Denis Mahon, brokered a compromise-sharing agreement in 1959.