Robert Boothby, Baron Boothby

Robert John Graham Boothby, Baron Boothby, (12 February 1900 – 16 July 1986), often known as Bob Boothby, was a British Conservative politician.

The only son of Sir Robert Tuite Boothby, KBE, of Edinburgh and a cousin of Rosalind Grant, mother of the broadcaster Sir Ludovic Kennedy, Boothby was educated at St Aubyns School, Eton College, and Magdalen College, Oxford.

Before going up to Oxford, near the end of the First World War, he trained as an officer and was commissioned into the Brigade of Guards, but was too young to see active service.

Boothby read History at the University of Oxford; the shortened war course was not classed, being marked either 'Pass' or 'Fail'.

He attended a few lectures and did some general reading, but, as he cheerfully observed, "there were far too many other things to do".

He achieved a pass without distinction in 1921.

After Oxford, he became a partner in a firm of stockbrokers.

Boothby was an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate for Orkney and Shetland in 1923 and was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Aberdeen and Kincardine East in 1924.

Boothby was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill from 1926 to 1929.

From 1930, Boothby had a long affair with Lady Dorothy Macmillan, wife of the Conservative politician Harold Macmillan (prime minister from 1957 to 1963).

He helped launch the Popular Front in December 1936.

He held junior ministerial office as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food in 1940–41.

He was later forced to resign his post and go to the back benches for not declaring an interest when asking a parliamentary question.

During the Second World War he joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and served as a junior staff officer with Bomber Command, and later as a liaison officer with the Free French Forces, retiring with the rank of Flight Lieutenant.

Boothby opposed free trade in food stuffs, and claimed that such a policy would invalidate the Agriculture Act 1947 and ruin British farmers.

This economic liberalism of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rab Butler, led to Boothby complaining that "The Tory Party have in fact become the Liberal Party" and cited what the leader of the Liberal Party (Clement Davies) had said to him about Butler: "Sir Robert Peel has come again."

In response, Davies claimed that Boothby "has been sitting on the wrong side of the House for many years. Undoubtedly he said tonight that he is the planner of planners. I do not believe in that kind of planning. The hon. Member seems to know better than the ordinary person what is good for the ordinary person, what he ought to buy, where he ought to buy it, where he ought to manufacture and everything else of that kind. There is the true Socialist".

Boothby was a British delegate to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe from 1949 until 1957 and advocated the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community (a predecessor of the European Union).

He was a prominent commentator on public affairs on radio and television, often taking part in the long-running BBC radio programme Any Questions.

He also advocated the virtues of herring as a food.

He held the seat until its abolition in 1950, when he was elected for its successor constituency of East Aberdeenshire.

In 1950 he received the Legion of Honour for his latter services.

He was appointed an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1950, and a KBE in 1953.

During the 1950s, Boothby was a prominent advocate of decriminalizing homosexual acts between men.

In his memoirs, he wrote that he was determined to "do something practical to remove the fear and misery in which many of our most gifted citizens were then compelled to live".

He was Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Economic Affairs, 1952–1956; Honorary President of the Scottish Chamber of Agriculture, 1934; Rector of the University of St Andrews, 1958–1961; Chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, 1961–1963; and President, Anglo-Israel Association, 1962–1975.

In December 1953, he sent a memorandum to David Maxwell Fyfe, then the Home Secretary, calling for the establishment of a departmental inquiry into homosexuality.

He argued that:"By attaching so fearful a stigma to homosexuality as such, you put a very large number of otherwise law-abiding and useful citizens on the other side of the fence which divides the good citizen from the bad. By making them feel that, instead of unfortunates they are social pariahs, you drive them into squalor – perhaps into crime; and produce that very 'underground' which it is so clearly in the public interest to eradicate."Boothby premised his argument for law reform on the idea that it was the role of the state "not to punish psychological disorders – rather to try and cure them".

He argued in the House of Commons that the law as it was did not "achieve the objective of all of us, which is to limit the incidence of homosexuality and to mitigate its evil effects".

In 1954 (echoing words he had said in 1934), Boothby complained that for 30 years he had been advocating "a constructive policy on broad lines" but that this had not been taken up: "The doctrine of infallibility has always applied to the Treasury and the Bank of England".

Re-elected a final time in 1955, he gave up the seat in 1958 when he was raised to the peerage, triggering a by-election.

After the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution recommended decriminalization in the Wolfenden Report of 1957, Boothby claimed that, through his correspondence with Fyfe, he had been "primarily responsible" for the committee's establishment.

Boothby had a colourful, if reasonably discreet, private life, mainly because the press refused to print what they knew of him, or were prevented from doing so.

Boothby was raised to the peerage as a life peer with the title Baron Boothby, of Buchan and Rattray Head in the County of Aberdeen, on 22 August 1958.

There is a blue plaque on his house in Eaton Square, London.

He was awarded an Honorary LLD by St Andrews in 1959, and was made an Honorary Burgess of the Burghs of Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Turriff and Rosehearty.

He was the subject of This Is Your Life in October 1963, when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at BBC Television Centre.

Woodrow Wyatt, whose reliability has been questioned, claimed after the death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother that she had confided to him in an interview in 1991 that "The press knew all about it", referring to Boothby's affairs, and that she had described Boothby as "a bounder but not a cad".

He was rumoured to be the father of the youngest Macmillan daughter, Sarah, although the 2010 biography of Harold Macmillan by D. R. Thorpe discounts Boothby's paternity.

This connection to Macmillan, via his wife, has been seen as one of the reasons why the police did not investigate the death of Edward Cavendish, 10th Duke of Devonshire, who died in the presence of suspected serial killer John Bodkin Adams.