He was a contender to succeed Harold Macmillan as prime minister in 1963, renouncing his hereditary peerage to do so, but was passed over in favour of Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

[5] Hogg was educated at Sunningdale School and then Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar and won the Newcastle Scholarship in 1925.

After a knee wound in August 1941, which almost cost him his right leg, Hogg was deemed too old for further front-line service, and later served on the staff of General "Jumbo" Wilson before leaving the army with the rank of major.

In the run-up to the 1945 election, Hogg wrote a response to the book Guilty Men, called The Left Was Never Right.

When, in the middle of the operation, Lord Mountbatten threatened to resign as First Sea Lord in protest, Hailsham ordered him in writing to stay on duty: he believed that Mountbatten was entitled to be protected by his minister, and that he was bound to resign if the honour of the Navy was impaired by the conduct of the operation.

[3] Hailsham remained critical of the actions of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, during the crisis, believing that he had suffered from a failure of nerve.

Hailsham became Minister of Education in 1957 under Macmillan, holding the office for eight months, before accepting appointment as Lord President of the Council and Chairman of the Conservative Party in September 1957.

[7] In June 1963 when his fellow Minister John Profumo had to resign after admitting lying to Parliament about his private life, Hailsham attacked him savagely on television.

The Labour MP Reginald Paget called this "a virtuoso performance of the art of kicking a friend in the guts".

He added, "When self-indulgence has reduced a man to the shape of Lord Hailsham, sexual continence involves no more than a sense of the ridiculous".

[9] Hailsham was Leader of the House of Lords when Harold Macmillan announced his sudden resignation from the premiership for health reasons at the start of the 1963 Conservative Party conference.

[10] Hailsham, who was at first Macmillan's preferred successor, announced that he would use the newly enacted Peerage Act 1963 to disclaim his title and fight a by-election and return to the House of Commons.

One evening when giving a political address, he was hailed by his supporters as he leaned over the lectern pointing at a long-haired heckler.

Another time, when a Labour Party supporter waved a Harold Wilson placard in front of him, Hogg smacked it with his walking-stick.

[11] When Edward Heath won the 1970 general election he received a life peerage as Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone, of Herstmonceux in the County of Sussex, and became Lord Chancellor.

[3] The Act also established a unified court service, under the responsibility of the Lord Chancellor's Department, which as a result expanded substantially.

He put great emphasis on the traditional roles of his post, sitting on the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords more frequently than any of his post-war predecessors.

[3] Appointment of deputies to preside over the Lords enabled him to give more time to judicial work, although he often sat on the woolsack himself.

He was protective of the English bar, opposing the appointment of solicitors to the High Court and the extension of their rights of audience.

He opposed the introduction of contingency fees, observing that the professions were "not like the grocer's shop at the corner of a street in a town like Grantham" – a reference to Margaret Thatcher's origins – (Hansard 5L, 505.1334, 7 April 1989)[12] and arguing that the Courts and Legal Services Act (1990) disregarded "almost every principle of the methodology which law reform ought to attract" and was no less than an attempt to "nationalise the profession and part of the judiciary" (Hansard 5L, 514.151, 19 December 1989).

Hailsham inherited Carter's Corner Place, a 17th-century house with wide views over the Pevensey marshes and the English Channel, from his father in 1950, and practised farming there for more than a decade.

[16] Hailsham remained physically energetic until late middle age, and in the 1960s he could often be seen cycling unsteadily around London, dressed in the bowler hat and pin-striped suit of a barrister.

[3] Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone died from heart failure and pneumonia at his home in Putney Heath, London, on 12 October 2001, aged 94.

His most notable success may well have been his role in reviving the Conservative Party's fortunes in the 1950s … even so, Hailsham's actual achievements in politics arguably failed to reflect his remarkable intellectual power and oratorical skills" and that given his "emotional and temperamental volatility and even instability ... it is difficult to make any rational estimate of quite what a Hailsham administration would have achieved" had he become Prime Minister in 1963.

The Wintringham volume had been republished in the lead up to the 1945 general election, widely acknowledged at the time as a major factor in shifting public opinion away from the Conservative party.

Perhaps his most important book, the Penguin paperback The Case for Conservatism, was a similar response to Labour Marches On by John Parker MP.

Published in 1947 in the aftermath of the crushing Conservative election defeat of 1945, and aimed at the mass market and the layman, it presented a well-written and coherent case for Conservatism.

For example, in the 19th century Conservatives often opposed the policies of prevailing British liberalism, favouring factory regulation, market intervention and controls to mitigate the effects of laissez faire capitalism, but in the 20th century the role of Conservatism was to oppose an ostensible danger from the opposite direction, the regulation, intervention, and controls favoured by social democracy.

In 1975 he published his spiritual autobiography The Door Wherein I Went, which included a brief chapter of Christian apologetics, using legal arguments concerning the evidence for the life of Jesus.