Bob Boothby

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bob Boothby, Baron Boothby, 1975

Robert John Graham Boothby, Baron Boothby (* 12. February 1900 in Edinburgh , Scotland ; † 16th July 1986 in London ) was a British politician of the Conservative Party .

Political career

Boothby was in the 1924 election as a candidate of the Conservative Party for the first time a member of the lower house ( House of Commons ) elected and was in this until 1950 MP for the constituency of Aberdeenshire and Kincardineshire Eastern and subsequent to 1958 for Aberdeenshire East .

First he was from 1926 to 1929 private secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill . In the following years he was a close collaborator and confidante of Churchill and shared his cautionary assessment of the growing power of Adolf Hitler and therefore pushed for stronger armaments.

After Churchill first became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940 , Boothby was appointed Parliamentary Secretary in the Department of Food. Although he always protested to be innocent, he resigned from this office in January 1941 after a committee of inquiry of the House of Commons found guilty of having offered political services in exchange for financial contributions.

After the Second World War he was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 1949 to 1957 and a strong supporter of the Western European Union , which was founded on October 23, 1954 .

After leaving the House of Commons, he was promoted to Life Peer on August 22, 1958 as Baron Boothby , of Buchan and Rattray Head in the County of Aberdeen, and thus became a member of the House of Lords for life . He was also the successor to David Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir from 1958 to 1961 rector of the University of St Andrews , the oldest university in Scotland. He was succeeded in this office by Charles Percy Snow .

Baron Boothby was also a member of the renowned The Other Club , founded in 1911 by Churchill and Frederick Edwin Smith , who later became the 1st Earl of Birkenhead.

The Kray scandal

Boothby was known to be a promiscuous bisexual . Homosexuality was still forbidden at that time; from 1954 he propagated a reform of this law.

In 1964 the Sunday Mirror tabloid published an article reporting an investigation by Scotland Yard into a homosexual relationship between a man from the London underworld and a Conservative MP. There were rumors that it was the underworld greats Ronnie Kray and Lord Boothby.

Although no names were mentioned in the Mirror - which the German magazine Der Stern did a week later - the Kray twins threatened the journalists involved, and Boothby himself threatened to sue. The newspaper then withdrew the story and printed an apology, the editor-in-chief was sacked, and Boothby received £ 40,000 in settlement compensation. Boothby and his parliamentary colleague, Tom Driberg from the Labor Party , also a friend of the Krays, tried again and again through political means to stop investigations against the twins.

In July 2009, letters between Ronnie Kray and Lord Boothby were sold at auction, proving that, contrary to Boothby's claims, the two men were more closely related.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The London Gazette : No. 41479, p. 5211 , HMSO, August 22, 1958.
  2. ↑ David Barrett: Letters shed new light on Kray twins scandal , Sunday Telegraph , July 26, 2009
  3. ^ Obituary of Reggie Kray , BBC News. October 1, 2000. Retrieved August 16, 2011. 
  4. ↑ The Telegraph v. July 26, 2009

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Boothby, Bob
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Boothby, Robert John Graham, Baron Boothby
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Conservative Party politician, Member of the House of Commons
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Edinburgh , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH July 16, 1986
Place of death London