Fourteen years later, he strongly supported the Internal Settlement between Smith and the moderate nationalist leaders under which Bishop Abel Muzorewa became Prime Minister, though effective power remained in white hands.

In his latter years at his Cambridgeshire home, Stibbington Hall, the only person whose photographs were displayed in more than one room (apart from those of his beloved late wife, Elizabeth) were those of Ian Smith.

[2] For the first two years of his life, Stephen lived with his parents on the farm; then he and his younger sister were sent home to England, where they were brought up by their doting and affluent maternal grandmother in Berkshire.

[2] At Eton he managed to combine an undistinguished academic career, and with the clandestine help of his grandmother and her chauffeur, to engage in racing as an amateur jockey and, more importantly for his future, Hastings began a lifelong love for steeplechasing and fox hunting.

[citation needed] On leaving school, his grandmother offered to pull strings to enable him to pursue a career either as a racehorse trainer or in the Scots Guards.

Commissioned in the Scots Guards from Royal Military College, Sandhurst in January 1940, with the service number of 112983, Hastings saw action against the Italians and Germans in the Western Desert, taking part in Operation Crusader, which relieved Tobruk and threw Rommel out of Cyrenaica.

After disagreements with his company commander he joined the SAS, and before El Alamein participated in a successful operation against an airfield, and a disastrous one against Benghazi, earning a Mention in Dispatches.

He arrived in the newly liberated Paris in August 1944, then was dropped with a wireless operator and interpreter behind enemy lines in the Apennines as chief liaison officer to the Italian partisans.

Hastings thereupon convinced the German officer in charge that it would be in his best interest to provide them with a fine seaside villa and supplies of champagne for the weeks that it would take the Allies to arrive.

When the friend returned to England, Hastings remained in Austria, taking a staff job with the Army with the sole duty of looking after the polo ponies, and occasionally played himself.

The unproven imputations put forward in the book Spycatcher, in which Hastings was portrayed as participating in an attempt to destabilise the Harold Wilson government were always vehemently denied by him.

His disgust at the Suez Crisis led to his putting his name down with Conservative Central Office as a candidate, and in 1960 he was offered the safe seat of Mid Bedfordshire; He won a 1960 by-election caused by the elevation to the peerage of Alan Lennox-Boyd.

In 1977 he alleged that five prominent trades union officials were agents for communist countries, based on tape recordings made by the Czech defector Josef Frolík.

The following year, before Margaret Thatcher came into office, Hastings and Brian Crozier wrote her a paper setting out "the diabolical nature of the Communist conspiracy" against Britain.

After retiring from Parliament, he became a partner and manager of the Milton Park Stud, a member of the council of the Thoroughbred Breeders' Association, and joint master of the Fitzwilliam Hunt.

Lady Hastings was born the younger daughter of the 2nd and last Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent and Joyce Langdale of Houghton Hall, West Riding, Yorkshire, who secondly married Thomas Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 10th and last Earl Fitzwilliam.