Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich, (22 February 1890 – 1 January 1954), known as Duff Cooper, was a British Conservative Party politician and diplomat who was also a military and political historian and writer.
First elected to Parliament in 1924, he lost his seat in 1929 but returned to Parliament in the 1931 Westminster St George's by-election, which was seen as a referendum on Stanley Baldwin's leadership of the Conservative Party. He later served in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty. He resigned from the cabinet over the Munich Agreement of 1938.
When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he named Cooper as Minister of Information. In 1941, as a member of the Cabinet, Cooper served as British Minister in Singapore before its fall to the Japanese. He later served an important role as representative to Charles de Gaulle's Free France (1943–1944) and ambassador to France from 1944 to 1948.
Duff Cooper was born at Cavendish Square. He was the only son of the society doctor Sir Alfred Cooper (1838–1908), a surgeon who specialised in the sexual diseases of the upper classes (his carriage was humorously known as "Cooper's Clap Trap"), and Lady Agnes Cecil Emmeline Duff, daughter of James Duff, 5th Earl Fife and descendant of King William IV. She had already eloped with two husbands, the first of whom she deserted and the second of whom died, before she married Cooper in 1882. Duff Cooper had three older sisters and one older half-sister from his mother's first marriage. He attended two prep schools, including Wixenford. He was unhappy at prep school but was then very happy at Eton College.
At New College Oxford (1908–1911), Cooper's Eton friendship with John Neville Manners won him entry into a circle of young aristocrats and intellectuals known as "The Coterie", including Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Raymond Asquith, Sir Denis Anson, Edward Horner and Lady Diana Manners. Cooper cultivated a reputation for eloquence and fast living, and although he had established a reputation as a poet, he earned an even stronger reputation for gambling, womanising and drinking in his studied emulation of the life of the 18th- and 19th-century Whig statesman Charles James Fox. Cooper's memory and gift for writing enabled him to do reasonably well at exams. He obtained a second in Modern History.
Following Oxford, Cooper entered the Foreign Service in October 1913, at the third attempt. During the war, he worked in the commercial and the contraband departments. Owing to the national importance of his work at the cipher desk, he was exempted from military service until June 1917, when he joined the Grenadier Guards. He had not actively sought to join the army but was happy to be "released" as a result of the manpower shortage, as he thought joining the Army the decent thing to do. To his surprise, most of his fellow officer cadets were working-class and lower-middle-class men, almost all of whom had already served in the ranks.
Cooper spent six months on the Western Front during which he, Philip Ziegler wrote, proved himself "exceptionally courageous, resourceful, and a natural leader of men" when the life expectancy of junior officers was very brief. He suffered a minor wound in the advance to the Albert Canal in August 1918 and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for conspicuous gallantry, a rare decoration for a junior officer. The citation for his DSO appeared in The London Gazette in November 1918 and reads as follows:
For conspicuous gallantry during an attack. Although the remainder of his company lost direction he led his platoon on to the objective and captured part of it. When supports arrived he led two sections against a machine-gun post, the four men immediately behind him were shot, but he went on alone and compelled the surrender of eighteen men and two machine guns. Later, with a patrol of six men he succeeded in capturing eighty-nine prisoners. He showed splendid courage and devotion to duty.
Almost all of his closest friends, including Shaw-Stewart, Horner and Asquith, were killed in the war, which allowed him to draw closer to Lady Diana Manners, a socialite who was known for her eccentricities.
After demobilisation, he returned to the Egypt Department and was then Private Secretary to the Parliamentary Under-Secretary (i.e., assistant to the junior minister). He needed money to enter politics. He played significant roles in the Egyptian and Turkish Crises in the early 1920s.
On 2 June 1919, he married Lady Diana Manners, whose family were initially opposed to the match. Diana's mother, in particular, thought Cooper a promiscuous drinker and gambler, who was without title, position or wealth. Diana was officially the daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland but was widely believed, by herself included, to be the natural daughter of Harry Cust, a Belvoir Castle neighbour and MP. In 1923, Lady Diana played the Madonna in the Max Reinhardt play The Miracle. The money which she earned enabled Cooper to resign from the Foreign Office in July 1924.
Lady Diana tolerated Cooper's numerous affairs. They included the Franco-American Singer sewing-machine heiress Daisy Fellowes, the socialite Gloria Guinness, the French novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin and the writer Susan Mary Alsop (then an American diplomat's wife, by whom he had an illegitimate son, William Patten Jr, who later fathered W. Samuel Patten). The polo player "Boy" Capel's wife, Diana, and the Anglo-Irish socialite and fashion model Maxime de la Falaise were two more, but Lady Diana reportedly did not mind and loved him nonetheless; she explained to their son: "They were the flowers, but I was the tree".
1924–1931: In and out of Parliament
Within weeks, Cooper was selected for the winnable seat of Oldham, where he was elected at the general election in October 1924, with a 13,000 majority over the sitting Labour member. He made a very successful maiden speech on Egypt, which was praised by H. A. L. Fisher, who spoke next. The speech was also praised in several newspaper accounts. He was seen as a "coming man" within the party. Cooper was a stalwart supporter of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and a friend of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill. In January 1928, he was appointed Financial Secretary to the War Office, not a position that he would have chosen. Secretary of State Sir Laming Worthington-Evans gave him much responsibility. Cooper very likely would have been promoted if the Conservatives had won the election in 1929, but they were defeated, and he lost his own seat.
John Julius, his only legitimate child, was born in 1929. Out of Parliament, Cooper wrote a biography of the French statesman Talleyrand, Napoleon's famous chief diplomat. He wrote slowly but seldom needed to revise his drafts. Ziegler writes that "rarely can subject and author have been more satisfactorily matched" as both men were worldly and disliked cant. The book was eventually published in 1932 by his nephew Rupert Hart-Davis to critical praise and lasting success.
1931–1935: By-election and junior minister
The March 1931 by-election for the constituency of Westminster St George's (caused by the death of Cooper's recent boss, Laming Worthington-Evans), saw Beaverbrook's Empire Free Trade Crusade party threatening the Conservative position at a time when satisfaction with Baldwin's leadership was at a low. When the original Conservative candidate, John Moore-Brabazon, stepped down, Duff Cooper agreed to contest the election in what was regarded as a referendum on Baldwin's leadership. He won the seat with a majority of 5,710, thus returning to Parliament and serving until 1945.
In August 1931, on the formation of the National Government, he was appointed Financial Secretary to the War Office under the elderly Lord Crewe, who left Cooper to do a great deal of the work. In June 1934 he was appointed Financial Secretary to the Treasury, a traditional stepping stone to the Cabinet. This brought him close to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain, who thought highly of him. He had been to Nazi Germany and had seen and been appalled by a Nuremberg Rally. Chamberlain told him to tone down his criticisms of Hitler. Cooper urged rearmament, which was not then a fashionable view, and briefed Winston Churchill, who was then on the backbenches, that Hitler seriously wanted war.