Julian Amery, Baron Amery of Lustleigh

Harold Julian Amery, Baron Amery of Lustleigh, (27 March 1919 – 3 September 1996) was a British Conservative Party politician, who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for 39 of the 42 years between 1950 and 1992. He was appointed to the Privy Council in 1960.

Amery was created a life peer upon his retirement from the House of Commons in 1992. For three decades, he was a leading figure in the Conservative Monday Club. He was the son-in-law of Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan. In 1945, his brother John was hanged for high treason during the Second World War.

Early and family life Amery was born in Chelsea, London, on 27 March 1919. His father was Leo Amery, a British statesman and Conservative politician. He was educated at Eaton House, Summer Fields School, Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford. While an undergraduate, he had a brief romance with the future novelist Barbara Pym, who was six years his senior.

Military service Before the Second World War started, Amery was a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and later an attaché for the British Foreign Office in Belgrade. After the war began he joined the RAF as a sergeant in 1940, then was commissioned and transferred to the British Army on the General List in 1941, reaching the rank of captain.

He spent 1941–42 in the eastern Mediterranean (the Middle East, Malta, Yugoslavia) and served as liaison officer to the Albanian Resistance Movement in 1943–44 ("The Musketeers": Captain Julian Amery, Major David Smiley and Lieutenant-Colonel Neil McLean). The following year, Amery went to China to work with General Carton de Wiart, then Prime Minister's personal representative to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Amery became a close friend of King Zog of Albania and described him as "the cleverest man I have ever met".

Political career Amery won a parliamentary seat in the first general election held after he returned to civilian life, in 1950. He was elected as Conservative MP for Preston North, going on to hold a number of government offices, all in governments led by his father-in-law, now the Prime Minister. He began with two Under-Secretaryships of State: for War (1957–58) and for the Colonies (1958–60).

Under the Heath administration, Amery held three ministerial posts: Minister for Public Building and Works (1970), Minister for Housing and Construction (1970–72) and Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (1972–74). In 1948, Amery opposed GATT, arguing that it limited imperial preference.

In late 1962 Amery made these comments after Egypt sent troops to Yemen to prevent an insurrection: "The prosperity of our people rests really on the oil in the Persian Gulf, the rubber and tin of Malaya, and the gold, copper and precious metals of South- and Central Africa. As long as we have access to these; as long as we can realize the investments we have there; as long as we trade with this part of the world, we shall be prosperous. If the communists [or anyone else] were to take them over, we would lose the lot. Governments like Colonel Nasser's in Egypt are just as dangerous."

In 1963, Amery took charge of Quintin Hogg's campaign for leadership of the Conservative Party.

In early 1975, he took part in a House of Commons debate on the Trades Unions Congress's invitation to Alexander Shelepin, the former Soviet KGB chief, to visit Britain. He stated that "more and more people are beginning to look upon the TUC as a Communist-penetrated show and this invitation must strengthen that view."

According to Margaret Thatcher's 1995 memoir, The Path to Power, when Harold Wilson's Labour government proposed devolution for Scotland in 1976, "Julian Amery and Maurice Macmillan proved effective leaders of the anti-devolution Tory camp."

Although he was Harold Macmillan's son-in-law, he did not defend him when Count Nikolai Tolstoy published The Minister and the Massacres in 1986, focusing the ultimate burden of blame sharply on Macmillan for the 1945 Bleiburg repatriations and the Cossack repatriations. Amery stated that the repatriations were "one of the few blots on Harold that I can think of".

Personal life On 26 January 1950, he married Catherine Macmillan (19 November 1926 – 27 May 1991), daughter of Harold Macmillan. The couple had one son and three daughters.

Amery died from heart failure on 3 September 1996, aged 77, at his home in Eaton Square, Westminster, London. He is buried with his wife (who predeceased him) at the Church of St John the Baptist in Lustleigh, Devon, along with his father Leo Amery.