BiographyThis is a long and kindly-meant biography. Yet, as an obvious admirer of the seventh Earl of Longford, the author's attempts to pin down the butterfly impulses of the some-time politician, banker, publisher, social reformer and hot-shot Catholic convert leave his subject looking even more peculiar than the Lord Porn figure beloved of Private Eye.
The problem lies in the inconsistencies of character - a sweet-natured man, apparently incapable of perceiving the feeling of others, or the havoc which sudden changes of heart might wreak. Perhaps that fault had a medical explanation, springing from some undiagnosed form of Asperger's Syndrome? Or perhaps the lack of empathy began in childhood, when his widowed and emotionally crippled mother much preferred her eldest son, Edward? Whatever the reason, Frank Longford's identification as outcast begins early, most obviously at Eton, where, he proudly told his biographer, he was the most unpopular boy in the school.
Irish nationalism was one of the causes. The family were staying in Pakenham Hall (now Tullynally) when the Easter Rising began. Determined to get them home to England before conditions worsened, their mother set off with the two boys. Afterwards, Edward wrote a lively account of crossing Dublin where fighting had recently ceased, while Frank "preserved a complete detachment". Before long, the sickly elderly brother was proclaiming his support for Sinn Féin and shouting "Up the Republic!" at every opportunity, causing schoolyard punch-ups in which Frank, a convinced Unionist, was forced to take his side.
And while Edward stuck with his convictions until his death in 1961 - losing more than one major inheritance to his younger brother as a result - Frank showed little early interest in politics. At Oxford, with friends like Hugh Gaitskell and John Betjeman, he enjoyed taking a "third point of view, whatever it might have been". Even marriage to the committed Labour supporter, Elizabeth Harman, took years to move him to the left.
Like every new cause he took up, Pakenham threw himself into local politics with the zeal of a convert. Yet he did not wander far outside the Pale. As an Oxford don, his Labour ward of Cowley and Iffley was packed with left-wing grandees. They ignored young Harold Wilson for snobbish reasons (treatment which would rebound on Longford in later years) and showed little concern for the upstairs-downstairs contradictions of English life. Once, however, when Elizabeth was running for a Westminster seat in Birmingham, she plucked Antonia and Thomas from their private school in Oxford to enrol them in the local primary school for a week. Afterwards, their father wrote: "I am so glad they enjoy the school - a good omen for their great working-class leadership careers". Leadership and a Westminster seat would evade Pakenham all his life, yet it is striking how often membership of the ruling classes shoehorned him into jobs. Despite his socialist ideals, the advantages of aristocratic connections were unquestionably accepted. Yet, like the ignored child, he constantly sought attention.
The biographer often mentions a great sense of "humour and fun", but the few examples offered amount to a series of pratfalls, including the famous "Pakenham Leap" when, on a diplomatic visit to Germany, he jumped out of the aircraft before the steps were delivered.
Catholicism and Irishness too, set him apart. At a time "when the names of the few Roman Catholic members of the House of Lords were still italicised in Vacher's Parliamentary Companions, his emotional conversion looks very much in character.
Interest in Irish history was equally out of the ordinary, beginning with a study of the Anglo-Irish treaty, Peace By Ordeal, published in 1936 to favourable reviews. Later, his improbable friendship with Eamon de Valera proved little help in pre-war discussions about British access to Irish ports. Over dinner in Dublin, in 1948, he discussed the next Commonwealth conference with foreign minister Seán MacBride, totally unaware that Ireland's withdrawal from the Commonwealth would be announced the following morning.
Described as a "Don Quixote" and a "holy fool", he seems to have brought a bumbling amateurishness to every position he was given, and as his political aspirations were pushed further to the margins, the eccentricities increased. Tony O'Reilly remembers the appearance under the showers of the chairman of the National Bank after a 1956 Ireland-France game, talking obsessively to the naked players. "I watched with fascination as the brim of his hat filled with water."
Maybe he spotted a photo opportunity. As this work shows, Frank Pakenham had been a publicity junkie since before the war. His investigations into pornography filled the tabloids, but an increasing fascination with prisons proved less funny, especially when his demands for Myra Hindley's release seemed to do more harm than good. In his epilogue, Peter Stanford argues for the long-term effectiveness of those self-publicising campaigns. Yet again and again, this is a study of failure, of a huge ego convinced of righteousness, forgetful of the trail of half-realised dreams left in his wake. Anthony Powell, who married Pakenham's sister, may have used him for the dippy left-wing Lord Erridge in A Dance to the Music of Time; but as Stanford unwittingly points out, many of his subject's characteristics are much closer to the inept but vaguely sinister Widmerpool.
Aisling Foster is a novelist and critic
The Outcasts' Outcast: Lord Longford By Peter Stanford Sutton, 406pp, £20