From the moment that he was elected to Parliament in a by-election in November 1960, Stephen Hastings was drawn into the activities of the Katanga lobby and he became one of the leading campaigners within the Conservative party for the whites of Southern Rhodesia to be given a square deal. He would have put it rather differently since he believed passionately that both whites and blacks in Southern Rhodesia had been betrayed by British policy. He was certainly no unimaginative diehard, but more than capable (as Dr Sue Onslow reports) of devising schemes, taken very seriously by senior politicians across Europe, that linked possibilities of moderating apartheid in South Africa, bringing Rhodesia back into the international community and developing a gold-based single currency for Europe . To his frustration they came to nothing, and many of his worst fears about the future of Rhodesia have been realised.
A founder member of the Monday Club, he was one of those who supported Lord Salisbury's abortive attempt at the 1965 Party Conference to commit the party to oppose any threat of sanctions in the run up to a possible unilateral declaration of independence. Talks with the British Government had reached an impasse and the Conservative leadership, then in Opposition, had put a compromise proposal to both sides. In consequence, the emergency motion, which Salisbury and his supporters wished to table, was turned down in favour of an official motion to be moved by the party's Commonwealth spokesman, Selwyn Lloyd.
Salisbury countered by moving an addendum. Hastings was amongst those who spoke for it and was warmly cheered when he declared that Britain ought to stand up to pressure from the Afro-Asians, the United Nations and the United States, and still more when he said that all too often 'one man, one vote' led not to democracy in Africa but to tyranny and anarchy. Despite their cheers, a majority in the hall thought the addendum unwise and agreed with Sir Alec Douglas Home, who made the closing speech, that it should not be put to Conference. Hastings was never called to speak at any subsequent Conference and he claimed that it was because of this speech. He was included on the Watching Committee that Lord Salisbury created on the model of that organised by his father in 1939, but he was more influential than most, with ready access in particular to Sir Alec Douglas Home.
In common with Julian Amery, Patrick Wall and others, he voted against oil sanctions when the Conservative Opposition split three ways in December 1965 - the front bench wanted the party to abstain - and was thereafter one of those who consistently preached the virtues of "conciliation, not coercion, peace not punishment" as far as Rhodesia was concerned.
Although he was undeniably able, and was sounded out about taking office in Heath's Government, his persistent opposition to sanctions made it virtually impossible for him to be made a junior minister, even when a negotiated settlement with Smith seemed to be on the cards. When in May 1972 the Pearce Commission ruled out the Government's "Proposals for a Settlement" as unacceptable to the black majority in Rhodesia, Hastings moved an amendment to the motion noting the report which urged the Government in vain either to implement the proposals or to withdraw from a situation over which they could no longer have meaningful control.
His final efforts to secure the kind of settlement he wanted for Rhodesia took the form of strong support for the internal settlement negotiated between Smith and Bishop Abel Muzorewa and he had high hopes that it would be backed by the Prime Minister. He was correspondingly dismayed by the Lancaster House settlement and Robert Mugabe's subsequent election victory. He saw it as a disaster caused by "unnecessary deference to the delusion of the Commonwealth, the Afro-Asian lobby and to the Americans", and it came as no surprise when he stood down from his seat at the 1983 General Election.
Stephen Lewis Edmonstone Hastings was himself the son of a Rhodesian farmer and politician, but after only two years with his parents, he and his sister returned to England where they were brought up by their grandmother. An undistinguished career at Eton owed a little perhaps to regular, clandestine activity as a jockey, and his grandmother eventually offered him a straight choice between becoming a trainer or a regular army officer. He chose the latter and was commissioned from Sandhurst as a Scots guardsman in 1939. He served with the Second Battalion in the Western Desert, but after falling out with his company commander, volunteered for the SAS. He took part in two operations in 1942, one of them something of a disaster, and earned a mention in despatches. Hastings was then diagnosed as suffering from chronic bronchitis and his next job was in Cairo, ADC to Richard Casey, Minister of State for the Middle East.
As soon as he was pronounced fit, Hastings joined SOE and he took part in the American landings in the south of France. After Paris had fallen in August 1943, he was parachuted into the Apennines as chief liaison officer with the Italian partisans. By his own account he found them demoralized and disorganised, but armed and trained them, building them into a fighting force over several months when he had to also evade enemy attempts to capture them and to deal with internal political battles. By April 1945 he had organised a force numbering some 4,000 men and with them, seized Piacenza and for three days held a bridgehead over the Po in the face of continuous heavy fire. For this exploit he was awarded the MC.
After the war, bored with life in the occupation forces in Austria, despite the opportunities it offered to ski and play polo, he left the army in 1948. Recruited into MI6, his first posting abroad was to Helsinki in 1950, thinly disguised as an Assistant Military Attache. From 1953 to 1958 he was attached to the Paris embassy, playing some part in the clandestine side of the Suez operation and through his contacts privy to the attempted coup against de Gaulle in 1958. From 1958 to 1960, with the rank of First Secretary, he worked in the political office of Middle Eastern Forces in Cyprus, coming into contact with Alan Lennox Boyd, the Colonial Secretary.
It was his disgust with the outcome of Suez that led him to seek a Conservative nomination and in the autumn of 1960 he was selected to succeed Lennox Boyd in mid Bedfordshire, the seat he was to hold for the next 22 years. Although his principal interests lay in defence and foreign policy - he was speedily elected to the Vice Chairmanship of the backbench foreign affairs committee - he also played an active part on the Horticultural sub committee of the Agricultural Committee, serving variously as its secretary and Vice Chairman. A sharp critic of the Labour Government's decision to abandon the TSR2, he published a well-received account of The Murder of TSR2 in 1966. During the Heath Government he was elected on to the executive of the 1922.
Rather more controversially he was involved in a political storm over his allegation in 1977, derived from revelations made by the former Czech agent, Josef Frolik, that certain trade unionist leaders were Communist agents; and as a result of a paper written subsequently by Brian Crozier and himself, Mrs Thatcher created a small committee chaired by Whitelaw to devise a counter subversion organisation. The idea was quietly killed after the Conservatives returned to power in 1979.
Hastings was active on the boards of a number of companies and chaired European Supersonic Aviation Ltd. His keen interest in hunting and horseracing, eventually led him in 1985 to become a partner and manager of the Milton Park Stud and he served on the Council of the Thoroughbred Breeders Association 1989-91. He also chaired the British Field Sports Society 1982-88 and was joint Master of the Fitzwilliam.
An excellent raconteur, he wrote a memoir, The Drums of Memory, in 1995, but he was never quite the same man after the death of his wife, Lizzie Anne in 1997. A passionate enemy and true friend, Hastings was a man who lived life to the full and would not have worried about the inevitable verdict on his political career, that a very sharp mind and constructive imagination was capable of being put to better use by the party he served, but that it was not was largely by his own choice.