He also initiated practical measures to ease offenders' reintegration into society. Longford was the only person to visit this dying man, a gesture repeated in countless episodes that never made headlines but which brought succour and relief. Though the tabloids port- rayed him as a man who got a kick out of contact with infamous killers - a throwback to the "Lord Porn" caricature - such "names" made up only one per cent of those Longford journeyed to see.Īn example in the late 1980s, he was contacted by the solicitor for a young Dutchman, convicted of a drugs offence, sent to Albany prison on the Isle of Wight, suffering from Aids and cut off by his family. He dreamed of being a reforming home secretary, an ambition that prompted his old friend Evelyn Waugh to remark "and then we would all be murdered in our beds".Ī prison visitor since the 1930s, Longford was still going, two and three times a week, to visit the abandoned and despised in jail until close to the end of his life. That is not to say he was without substantial achievements it was just that the goals he set himself remained outside his grasp. Though his prophecy of the failure of the punishment-oriented system of mainly Conservative postwar governments was repeatedly borne out, he never managed to translate his vision into workable reform.
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With his knack for making people laugh, and his tireless enjoyment of socialising as well as socialism, it was too easy to ignore the fact that Longford was way ahead of his time in questioning the direction of prison policy. His own character played a part never one to manage a concerted campaign, to push and cajole friends to a cause that many cabinet colleagues regarded indulgently as "Frank's hobby", he was too much the individualist, too fond of argument for argument's sake - an effect of his 1930s time as an Oxford politics don - and, ultimately, too lightweight in Whitehall to carry the day. His failure could not be put down only to the changed climate of the 20th century. The essential difference between the three was that while Wilberforce reformed the slave trade and Shaftesbury the factories, Longford only aspired to alter the penal system. Like William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury, his was a privileged upbringing like them, he was a devout Christian determined to translate faith into action like them, he was an unpredictable combination of political savvy and childlike clear-sightedness. And, in many senses, Long- ford was a 19th-century figure, struggling, often with humour, to deal with the problem of being born too late. Such a stance belonged more to the 19th-century philanthropic tradition than to 20th-century Westminster.
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Conscience came before party loyalty, heart before the head.
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Though a committed Labour party member, and a regular attender of PLP meetings and annual conferences well into his 90s, he saw politics less as a career and more as part of a moral crusade. It was not only his appearance - noble cranium and mad scientist's tonsure - that set Longford apart from his government colleagues. But he was not a conventional politician, and retirement gave him the freedom to take up the unpopular cause that was closest to his heart without fear of damaging his party. A Labour politician, who spent a record 22 years on the Lords frontbench, held junior office under Clement Attlee in the 1940s and later sat in Harold Wilson's cabinets, Longford could, when he resigned in 1968, have rested on his laurels. It was in the area of penal reform that he made his most lasting contribution. From the day his report came out, Longford rarely returned to the subject. The pornography escapade was an aberration, embarked upon against the advice of old friends and under the influence of Mary Whitehouse and anti-libertarians. Of the two, it was his lonely battle to help Hindley that revealed the true man.
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Here Longford was at his most liberal, Christian and naive, building on a lifetime of interest in prison reform, to argue that Hindley, and indeed all offenders, could be rehabilitated if society was prepared to forgive. The second, which continued for the last three decades of his life, attempted to win parole for the moors murderess, Myra Hindley. The first, launched in the early 1970s, aimed to outlaw pornography and presented him as a prurient reactionary and a shameless hypocrite touring the sex clubs that he wanted to close down. Though conducted simultaneously, the two crusades that made Frank Longford, who has died aged 95, a household name in Britain were an odd combination.