Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, DSO & Bar, TD, PC (29 March 1880 – 6 November 1944), was a British Conservative politician, soldier and businessman.

At Eton, Guinness was elected head of 'Pop', a self-appointing group whose members have a status similar to school prefects, and was also appointed as Captain of Boats.

[5][6][7] The company left London on the SS Cornwall for South Africa in early March 1900,[8] and during the service he received the honorary rank of captain in the army.

According to Wilson, "they had a devil-may-care ethos and distaste for military discipline ... they made lightning raids on Afrikaner positions; they skirmished ahead of advancing columns."

A year later, in 1907, Guinness was elected to the London County Council on which he sat until 1910 and also, at a 1907 by-election,[15] to the House of Commons as Conservative member for Bury St Edmunds,[16] which he continued to represent until 1931.

[19] In 1912, the editor of the magazine Guinness owned, The Outlook, broke the Marconi scandal, accusing Lloyd George and other Liberal ministers of share frauds.

[23] In a heated Armistice speech, he insisted that Germany pay full war reparations, that no ties be made with Russian Bolshevism, and that "Since the days of Mahomet no prophet has been listened to with more superstitious respect than has President Wilson" (of the USA).

This attitude had to change, and by the time of the Treaty debates in 1922 which established the Irish Free State, he said he preferred "a slippery slope to a precipice" and voted in favour.

Guinness's comments on Turkey were a part of the debate; he had come to admire Atatürk, despite serving at Gallipoli and he was appointed Under-Secretary of State for War under Lord Derby.

A ministerial vacancy enabled him to join the Cabinet as Minister of Agriculture from November 1925 until June 1929, where his main success was in increasing the sugar beet area.

[27] In 1930, Monyne and Churchill agreed that the government policies of dropping the Pound sterling off the gold standard and de-rating to cope with the Great Depression were inadequate, along with proposals for dominion status for India.

'"[29] At that time, they still shared the minority view in parliament; the majority agreed with Moyne's cousin-in-law 'Chips' Channon MP, who recorded about the Munich that "the whole world rejoices whilst only a few malcontents jeer.

"[30] On 11 September 1938, just before the Munich crisis, Churchill wrote an oft-repeated comment in a letter to Moyne: "Owing to the neglect of our defences and the mishandling of the German problem in the last five years, we seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame.

[32] In 1938, Moyne was appointed chairman of the West Indies Royal Commission, which was asked to investigate how best the British colonies in the Caribbean should be governed, after labour unrest.

"[46] In regard to the problems of the settlement, Moyne said: It must surely have a deplorable effect upon our Allies to be told by an ex-Cabinet Minister that the Palestine Administration do not like Jews, and that there are enough anti-Semites in Great Britain to back up the Hitler policy and spirit.

If a comparison is to be made with the Nazis, it is surely those who wish to force an imported régime upon the Arab population who are guilty of the spirit of aggression and domination.

[48] Of racial purity, Wasserstein wrote, "In fact, Moyne's speech, when placed in the context of his known views on matters of race can be shown to contradict this interpretation totally.

[52] Joel Brand, a member of the Jewish-Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee, approached the British in April 1944 with a proposal from Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of deporting Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz.

"[52] Brand told this story to the Kastner libel trial in 1953,[54] but in his autobiography published in 1956, he added a caveat "I afterwards heard that the man with whom I spoke was not, in fact, Lord Moyne, but another British statesman.

[57] This is supported by Shlomo Aronson, who traces the remark to a comment made by the head of the Refugee Section of the Foreign Office, Alec Randall, which was later repeated by Moshe Shertok at a meeting which Brand attended.

[65][66] Moyne arrived in his car with his driver, Lance Corporal Arthur Fuller, his secretary, Dorothy Osmond, and his ADC, Major Andrew Hughes-Onslow.

The first bullet hit him in the neck on the right side, just above the clavicle, the second penetrated his abdomen, punctured his colon and large intestine, and became embedded to the right of the second lumbar vertebrae, while the third shot, fired after Moyne raised his right hand, ripped across four of his fingers and went in and out of his chest, causing no serious injuries.

Moyne was rushed to a British military hospital in Cairo and admitted at 1:40 p.m., in critical condition, having lost a great deal of blood through gross haemorrhaging and suffering from shock.

[71][72] According to a member of the Lehi's three-man executive, Natan Yellin-Mor, the group's founder Ya'ir Stern had considered the possibility of assassinating the British Minister Resident in the Middle East as early as 1941 before Moyne held the position.

In particular, he was regarded as one of the architects of Britain's strict immigration policy, and to have been responsible for the British hand in the Struma disaster,[73] which followed a refusal to grant visas to Palestine for its Jewish refugee passengers, decided during his time as Colonial Secretary.

"According to Yaakov Banai (Mazal), who served as the commander of the fighting unit of Lehi, there were three purposes in the assassination:[77] Author James Barr suggests that a French intelligence initiative was behind Moyne's murder, because of his support for the Greater Syria plan.

[81] British prime minister Winston Churchill, who once described himself as a "Zionist,"[82] taking the view that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would provide Britain with a more reliable and powerful ally,[76] for the time-being tempered his support for Zionism.

wrote in his diary: The Times of London quoted Ha'aretz's view that the assassins "have done more by this single reprehensible crime to demolish the edifice erected by three generations of Jewish pioneers than is imaginable.

[51][90] The historian Brenner writes that the purpose of the attack on Moyne was also in order to show the efficacy of armed resistance and to demonstrate to the British that they were not safe in any place as long as they remained in Palestine.

[92] They were laid in state in the Jerusalem Hall of Heroism, where they were attended by many dignitaries, including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Ephraim Katzir.