David Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir

David Patrick Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir, (29 May 1900 – 27 January 1967), known as Sir David Maxwell Fyfe from 1942 to 1954 and as Viscount Kilmuir from 1954 to 1962, was a British Conservative politician, lawyer and judge who combined an industrious and precocious legal career with political ambitions that took him to the offices of Solicitor General, Attorney General, Home Secretary and Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain.

One of the prosecuting counsels at the Nuremberg Trials, he subsequently played a role in drafting the European Convention on Human Rights.

His academic education was paused during his service in the Scots Guards in 1918–19, at the end of the World War I.

After graduation, he worked for the British Commonwealth Union as political secretary to Sir Patrick Hannon MP, studying law in his spare time.

He entered Gray's Inn and was called to the bar in 1922.

He became a pupil of George Lynskey in Liverpool then joined his chambers to practise.

Maxwell Fyfe later wrote that his ambition was to be a silk (King's Counsel) in his thirties, a minister in his forties and at the top of the legal profession in his fifties.

Not pausing before beginning his political career in earnest, he stood as a Conservative for Wigan in 1924, an unwinnable parliamentary seat.

He cultivated the more winnable Spen Valley until 1929 when the party resolved not to oppose sitting Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) Sir John Simon while he was absent on the Simon Commission in India.

In 1934 he became King's Counsel.

Maxwell Fyfe was eventually elected to Parliament in Liverpool West Derby in a by-election in July 1935.

Meanwhile, Maxwell Fyfe's legal career had prospered.

He was Recorder of Oldham from 1936 to 1942.

Maxwell Fyfe, along with Patrick Spens, Derrick Gunston and others, backed the National Government over the Hoare–Laval Pact, and he supported Neville Chamberlain over the Munich Agreement.

However, after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Maxwell Fyfe joined the Territorial Army and, at the outbreak of World War II in September, he was deployed to the Judge Advocate-General's department with rank of major.

He was badly injured in an air raid in September 1940.

In May 1941 Maxwell Fyfe became deputy to Rab Butler's chairmanship of the Conservative Party Post War Problems Committee to draft policies for after the war.

In March 1942, Sir Winston Churchill, on the advice of Brendan Bracken, appointed Maxwell Fyfe Solicitor-General.

At the same time he was knighted and sworn of the Privy Council.

He applied himself to his work in the wartime coalition government with enormous industry and began some of the thinking and planning about how the leaders of the Nazi regime in Germany might be brought to account after the war.

He took over as chairman from Butler between July 1943 and August 1944 while Butler was busy passing the Education Act 1944 (see Political career of Rab Butler (1941-1951)).

As part of his duties, on 8 April 1945, he attended an Anglo-American discussion over the war crimes trial, at which, says the historian Richard Overy, "he presented the standard British argument for summary execution."

Whether Maxwell Fyfe believed such executions were the best method of dealing with the Nazis may be doubted, in view of his later work at the Nuremberg Trials; at the time, however, as a member of the government he had little choice but to follow the lead of the Prime Minister, Churchill, who repeatedly urged that summary justice be visited upon the Nazi leaders.

When the war in Europe ended and the coalition was dissolved in May 1945, Maxwell Fyfe was briefly Attorney-General in Churchill's caretaker government.

The Labour Party won a landslide victory in the United Kingdom general election of 1945 and Sir Hartley Shawcross became Attorney General and took responsibility as Britain's chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials.

Shawcross, to emphasise the non-partisan nature of the trials, appointed Maxwell Fyfe his deputy.

Shawcross was largely committed to his political duties in Westminster and played little part other than delivering the opening and closing speeches.

Maxwell Fyfe took on most of the day-to-day responsibilities as "capable lawyer, efficient administrator and concerned housemaster".

There were misgivings in some quarters as to how Fyfe would perform, cross-examination not being regarded as one of his strengths.

However, his cross-examination of Hermann Göring was one of the most noted cross-examinations in history.

In 1945-51 he earned an annual average of £25,000.

Maxwell Fyfe played a leading role in drafting the party's Industrial Charter of 1947 and chaired the committee into Conservative Party organisation that resulted in the Maxwell Fyfe Report (1948–49).

The report shifted the responsibility of funding electoral expenditure from the candidate to the constituency party, with the intention of broadening the diversity of MPs by making it harder for local associations to demand large personal donations from candidates.

After Nuremberg, Maxwell Fyfe returned to Parliament to shadow the Minister of Labour while simultaneously pursuing a full, busy and prominent career at the Bar, for example defending serial murderer John George Haigh in 1949.

Reputedly, he would arrive at the House of Commons at around 5.00 pm, often stay throughout debates that lasted all night then, after a quick shave and breakfast, leave for court.

He was assisted in his punishing schedule by his wife Sylvia, herself a Conservative Party worker.

As Home Secretary he led a crackdown against homosexuals in the UK in the 1950s, and declined to commute Derek Bentley's death sentence for the murder of a police officer.

His political ambitions were ultimately dashed in Harold Macmillan's cabinet reshuffle of July 1962.

Born in Edinburgh, the only son of William Thomson Fyfe, Headmaster of Aberdeen Grammar School, by his second wife Isabella Campbell, daughter of David Campbell, of Dornoch, co. Sutherland, he was educated at George Watson's College and Balliol College, Oxford, where, perhaps owing to his interest in politics, he achieved a third-class degree in Greats.

Whilst at Oxford, he was a member of the Stubbs Society.