Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian

Philip Henry Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian , KT , CH , PC , mostly known as Lord Lothian (born April 18, 1882 in London , † December 12, 1940 in Washington ) was a British politician, journalist and diplomat. He was one of the founders of the Federal Union and an important thought leader in European federalism . At the same time he was one of the main exponents of the British appeasement policy in the 1930s. He inherited the title of Marquess of Lothian in 1930 from his cousin Robert Kerr.

Philip Kerr was the son of Lord Ralph Drury Kerr and grandson of John Kerr, 7th Marquess of Lothian . After training at New College (Oxford) , he was a government official in the Cape Colony from 1905 to 1910 . In 1910 he returned to England, where he edited the Round Table Journal . In 1916 he became the private secretary of British War Minister and later Prime Minister David Lloyd George ; In 1919 he took part in the Paris Peace Conference. For this activity he was accepted into the Order of the Companions of Honor in March 1920 . During the twenties, Lord Lothian criticized the Treaty of Versailles several times , which had placed too bad conditions for Germany.

(South African after the governor, along with several other former colonial officer Alfred Milner as Milner's Kindergarten were called), Lord Lothian began for far-reaching reforms that the colonies have a greater say in the British Commonwealth of Nations should give. Unlike most of the other colonial officials, Lord Lothian was also more liberal on racial issues and sympathized with the Indian independence movement around Mahatma Gandhi . At the same time he tried to improve Anglo-American relations.

Coming from a Catholic family, Lord Lothian moved away from this denomination over time and, influenced by Nancy Astor , joined Christian Science .

From 1921 to 1922, Lord Lothian headed United Newspapers . In 1931 he was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for four months and then until 1932 Undersecretary of State for India in the British government. In 1936 he helped the American newspaper Washington Post to uncover the affair of the British King Edward VIII with Wallis Simpson , which led to the abdication of Edward VIII .

In the 1930s, Lord Lothian approached the ideas of European federalism, which he saw as the only way to prevent a new world war in the face of the political crisis . In 1935 he gave a well-known speech entitled Pacifism is not enough (nor patriotism either ), in which he declared that a system of sovereign nation-states must inevitably be closed even with actually peace-loving governments to wage war. He called for the League of Nations to be transformed into a federal state. After Lord Lothian had supported the British appeasement policy because of his sympathy for Germany as a member of the Cliveden Set , after the Munich Agreement in 1938 he intensified his efforts towards a federal organization of Europe. To this end, in November 1938, together with Lionel Curtis, he founded the Federal Union , one of the first national organizations to promote European federalism.

From 1939 to 1940 Lord Lothian was British Ambassador to the USA . He died of illness in 1940 after refusing medical care due to his religious beliefs. Since he had remained unmarried until the end of his life and had no children, the title of nobility of the family passed to his cousin Peter Kerr after his death.

He bequeathed Blickling Hall (in Norfolk ) to the National Trust .

Web links

• Pacifism is not enough (nor patriotism either) , on the Federal Union homepage
• Philip Henry Kerr (Lord Lothian) biography on spartacus-educational.com
• Newspaper article about Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

literature

• JRM Butler: Lord Lothian, Philip Kerr, 1882-1940. St. Martin's Press, New York 1960.

predecessor	Office	successor
Robert Kerr	Marquess of Lothian 1930-1940	Peter Kerr