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 a 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 counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, Maxwell Fyfe subsequently played a role in drafting the European Convention on Human Rights. As Home Secretary from 1951 to 1954 he greatly increased the number of prosecutions of homosexuals 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.
Early life 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, Sutherland,Cracroft's Peerage. he was educated at George Watson's College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he achieved a third-class degree in Greats. Whilst at Oxford, he was a member of the Stubbs Society. His academic education was paused during his service in the Scots Guards in 1918–19, at the end of the World War I. Also stated in Burke's Peerage and Who Was Who but omitted from sketches in both the Dictionary of National Biography (1961–1970 Supplement) and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 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.Dutton (2004). 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.Jago 2015, p.244
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. 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. In 1934 he became King's Counsel. He was Recorder of Oldham from 1936 to 1942.
Early political career 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 ArmyThe Oxford Dictionary of National Biography more precisely puts it as the Army Officers' Emergency Reserve. 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. He took over as chairman from Butler between July 1943 and August 1944 while Butler was busy passing the Education Act 1944.
Government
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. As part of his duties, on 8 April 1945, he attended an Anglo-American discussion over the war crimes trial, at which the historian Richard Overy says "he presented the standard British argument for summary execution."Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 11. 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, Winston Churchill, who repeatedly urged that summary justice be visited upon the Nazi leaders.Overy, p. 6. 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.
Nuremberg trials 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".Tusa & Tusa (1983), p. 136. There were misgivings in some quarters as to how Maxwell 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 in history.
Opposition 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. 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. In practice, it may have had the effect of lending more power to constituency parties and making candidates more uniform.
Maxwell Fyfe was a champion of European integration and a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from August 1949 to May 1952, becoming the Chair of the Assembly's Committee on Legal and Administrative Questions, and rapporteur on the committee drafting the European Convention on Human Rights. In his memoirsPolitical Adventure, The Memoirs of the Earl of Kilmuir (1964). he criticised Sir Anthony Eden for a negative stance that derailed the UK's opportunity to become a leader in Europe. Eden always rejected this and considered a libel action against Maxwell Fyfe.
Return to government Home Secretary Shortly before the United Kingdom general election of 1951, Maxwell Fyfe caused a stir when he appeared to hint in a radio interview that a Conservative government might legislate to curb the power of trade unions. When the Conservative Party was returned to power in the election, Churchill thought it unwise to appoint him Minister of Labour, and Maxwell Fyfe became both Home Secretary and cabinet minister for Welsh affairs. He was responsible for guiding several complicated pieces of legislation through the Commons, in particular those that established commercial television. He gained a reputation as a hard-working, thorough and reliable cabinet member.
In 1952, the Director General of MI5 (DG) was made directly answerable to the Home Secretary rather than the Prime Minister. Given this novel responsibility, Maxwell Fyfe issued the Maxwell Fyfe Directive which became the de facto constitution of the Security Service until the Security Service Act 1989 set it on a statutory basis.Andrew (2009), pp. 322–323. When Sir Percy Sillitoe resigned as DG in 1953, Maxwell Fyfe delegated the shortlisting of a successor to a committee of civil servants chaired by Sir Edward Bridges. The committee put forward Dick White and Sir Kenneth Strong. Maxwell Fyfe endorsed the committee's preference for White, observing to Churchill that an internal appointment would be good for the morale of the service.Andrew (2009), pp. 323–324.
Maxwell Fyfe's assumption of office as Home Secretary heralded a reign of fear for male homosexuals. A stern advocate of existing legislation criminalising homosexual acts, he started a campaign to "rid England of this male vice … this plague"Jenkins, Simon, "Make mine a glass of cannabis wine, thank you", The Guardian (Manchester), 19 October 2018. by dramatically increased arrests of male homosexuals through police surveillance and entrapment via the use of agents provocateurs, tapped telephones, forged documents and the absence of warrants.Stewart, Graham "The Accidental Legacy of a Homophobic Humanitarian", The Times (London), 2 October 2000. From 1,276 prosecutions in 1939 for actual or attempted sodomy or gross indecency, a year after he had assumed the office of Home Secretary prosecutions had soared to 5,443. Maxwell Fyfe subsequently sanctioned the establishment of the Wolfenden Report into homosexuality, but had he known its findings would recommend decriminalisation, it is unlikely he would have done so.
A conservative on the death penalty, Kilmuir was likewise conservative on the issue of homosexual rights, and led the opposition in the House of Lords to the implementation of the Wolfenden Report, which had recommended the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults. Geraldine Bedell viewed this stance as ironic, since it was Maxwell Fyfe, while Home Secretary, who had led the opposition to law reform in the Lords.Geraldine Bedell, "Coming out of the dark ages" , The Observer, London, 24 June 2007. As Bedell also notes: "Perhaps he thought, by handing over to a committee, to shelve the issue. Perhaps he assumed Wolfenden would find against, in which case, he chose a curious chairman, because Wolfenden had a gay son, Jeremy." Kilmuir still opposed liberalisation when a bill was introduced in the Lords (by Lord Arran) in 1965. Says Bedell: "For the opposition, Lord Kilmuir warned against licensing the 'buggers' clubs' which he claimed were operating behind innocent-looking doors all over London." Maxwell Fyfe told the Conservative backbencher Sir Robert Boothby, who was known in parliamentary circles to be bisexual, that it was not his intention to legalise homosexuality: "I am not going down in history", he told Boothby, "as the man who made sodomy legal."Family Britain 1951–1957 by David Kynaston, Bloomsbury 2009, p. 370 .