Douglas Richard Hurd, Baron Hurd of Westwell (born 8 March 1930) is an English Conservative Party politician and author who served in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major from 1979 to 1995.
A career diplomat and political secretary to Prime Minister Edward Heath, Hurd first entered Parliament in February 1974 as MP for the Mid Oxfordshire constituency (Witney from 1983). His first government post was as Minister for Europe from 1979 to 1983 (being that office's inaugural holder) and he served in several Cabinet roles from 1984 onwards, including Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (1984–85), Home Secretary (1985–89) and Foreign Secretary (1989–95). He stood unsuccessfully for the Conservative Party leadership in 1990, and retired from frontline politics during a Cabinet reshuffle in 1995.
In 1997, Hurd was elevated to the House of Lords and is one of the Conservative Party's most senior elder statesmen. He is a patron of the Tory Reform Group. He retired from the Lords in 2016.
Hurd was born in 1930 in the market town of Marlborough in Wiltshire. His father Anthony Hurd (later Lord Hurd) and grandfather Sir Percy Hurd were also Members of Parliament. Douglas attended Twyford School, Winchester, where he enjoyed reading the novels of John Buchan held in the library, and Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar and won the Newcastle Scholarship in 1947. He was also captain of school (head boy).
Following school Hurd did National Service, which he did not particularly enjoy, at a time when the Berlin Blockade made a Third World War seem far from unlikely. He began in July 1948 with a compulsory period in the ranks of the Royal Regiment of Artillery alongside young men of all social backgrounds. He later recorded that although living standards were no great shock after the spartan conditions at public school in those days, the petty dishonesty which he saw in the barrack room, and the waste of time which was so large a part of a conscript's experience, made him sceptical in later years of constituents' demands for a restoration of National Service. He was selected for officer training, attended Mons Officer Cadet School, Aldershot; from November 1948, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 5th Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery (as it was then called) at the start of March 1949. He was released from the Army in September 1949 to take up his place at Cambridge University. He trained for a few weeks each summer as a reserve officer until 1952.
Hurd went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1949. He achieved an upper second (II:1) in his preliminary exams in summer 1950. In March 1951 he was approached by an admiral to be recruited to British Intelligence. He attended a selection panel, but withdrew from the process because, he later wrote, he did not want a career which would have to be pursued in secret. Hurd's brother Julian, who was on the officer training course at Aldershot at the time, committed suicide in June 1951. In his third year, Hurd served as chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association for Michaelmas (autumn) Term 1951 and president of the Cambridge Union Society in Easter (summer) Term 1952. His special subject for study was the Second French Republic. He graduated in 1952 with a first-class degree (BA) in history.
In 1952, Hurd joined the Diplomatic Service. He was posted to China, the United States and Italy, before leaving the service in 1966 to enter politics as a member of the Conservative Party.
Hurd became private secretary (a political appointment, his salary paid by the Conservative Party) to Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, and was first elected to Parliament in February 1974 to represent the constituency of Mid Oxfordshire. Following his election, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the February 1974 Dissolution Honours, gazetted on 2 April 1974. At the 1983 general election the seat was replaced by Witney and he remained MP for that seat until his retirement from the House of Commons in 1997 having served 23 years in Parliament. His immediate successor was Shaun Woodward, who defected to Labour in 1999, and moved in 2001 to a safe Labour seat, before serving as Northern Ireland Secretary, a position Hurd once held. From 2001 to 2016, Hurd's former constituency was represented by the former Leader of the Conservative Party and former British prime minister, David Cameron.
Hurd was appointed Minister of State at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office upon the Conservative victory in the 1979 general election and remained in that post for the duration of the Parliament. Following the 1983 election Thatcher moved Hurd to the Home Office, but just over a year later he was promoted to Cabinet rank, succeeding Jim Prior as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In this position, his diplomatic skills paved the way for the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement on the future of Northern Ireland, which marked a turning point in British-Irish co-operation on the political situation in the troubled region. A month before the agreement was signed, however, Hurd returned to the Home Office, this time as Home Secretary, following the demotion of Leon Brittan to the Department of Trade and Industry.
Widely seen as a "safe pair of hands" and a solid, loyal member of the Cabinet, Hurd's tenure as Home Secretary was largely uncontroversial, although he was notably of the view that Her Majesty's Prison Service did not work effectively and argued for more rehabilitation of offenders and alternative sentencing.
Hurd brought in the Public Order Act, 1986, which created the crime of hate speech for speech which is "threatening, abusive or insulting" and which is spoken in public, with intent or likely to "stir up" racial hatred.
Candidature in the 1990 leadership election
Hurd's Cabinet career progressed further during the turbulent final months of Margaret Thatcher's prime ministership. On 26 October 1989, Hurd moved to the Foreign Office, succeeding John Major, whose rapid rise through the Cabinet saw him become Chancellor of the Exchequer in the wake of Nigel Lawson's resignation.
In mid-November 1990, Hurd supported Margaret Thatcher's candidature as Conservative Party leader against challenger Michael Heseltine, but on her withdrawal from the second round of the contest on 22 November, Hurd decided to enter the race as a moderate centre-right candidate, drawing on his reputation as a successful 'law-and-order' Home Secretary. He was endorsed by former Prime Minister and Conservative Party Leader Edward Heath. He was seen as an outsider, lagging behind the more charismatic Heseltine and the eventual winner, John Major, who shared the moderate centre-right political ground with Hurd but had the added advantages of youth and political momentum. Hurd's Etonian education may have also been a disadvantage. Years later, Hurd expressed frustration that his privileged background counted against him in the leadership election, commenting in an interview that "I should have said I am standing for leadership of the Tory party and not for some demented Marxist outfit". He came third, winning 56 of the 372 votes cast and, together with Heseltine, conceded defeat to allow Major, who had fallen just three votes short of an outright majority, to return unopposed and take over as prime minister on 27 November 1990. Hurd was gracious in defeat and, on the formation of Major's first Cabinet, was returned to his position as Foreign Secretary.
Hurd was widely regarded as a statesmanlike British Foreign Secretary, his tenure having been particularly eventful. He oversaw Britain's diplomatic responses to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as well as the first Gulf War to drive Ba'athist Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Hurd cultivated good relations with the United States under President George H. W. Bush, and sought a more conciliatory approach to other members of the European Community, repairing relationships damaged during the increasingly Eurosceptic tone of Margaret Thatcher's final years. Hurd was a signatory of the Maastricht Treaty establishing the European Union in 1992. Hurd welcomed a reunified Germany into the European political community in 1990.