Merlin Hanbury-Tracy, 7th Baron Sudeley
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Through Nazism, Adolf Hitler and Conservative Party (UK)
Hanbury-Tracy's reputation was severely damaged in later life by racist comments he made in reports and speeches, alongside comments he made praising the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. A member of the Conservative Party all his adult life, he was also sometimes President and Chairman of the Conservative Monday Club for seventeen years. He was Vice-Chancellor of the International Monarchist League, and President of the Traditional Britain Group until death.
Early life and education
Merlin Hanbury-Tracy was born on 17 June 1939 to Captain Michael Hanbury-Tracy, a Scots Guards officer, who died from wounds received at Dunkirk, and Colline Annabel, only daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Collis George Herbert St. Hill, the Royal North Devon Hussars, commander of the 2/5 battalion of Sherwood Foresters, who was also killed by a sniper at Villers-Plouich, France, on 8 July 1917.
Hanbury-Tracy's parents sent him to Eton College, one of England’s premier public schools. He later graduated in history from Worcester College, Oxford. Hanbury-Tracy was also sometimes an adjunct lecturer at the University of Bristol. He served his National Service obligations in the ranks of the Scots Guards.
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Political Activity
Lord Sudeley was a member of the House of Lords for 39 years. He inherited his peerage aged 2, and finally took his seat in the House at the age of 21. He was a regular attender and introduced several measures, most notably the Bill to prevent the unlicensed export of historical manuscripts and, in 1981, a Bill to uphold the Book of Common Prayer.
Expulsion from the House of Lords
Sudeley was one of the unelected hereditary peers expelled from the Upper House by the House of Lords Act 1999. Faced with losing his hereditary position, Sudeley opposed democratic reforms to the House of Lords. Sudeley claimed the House of Lords should be left unreformed, declaring that "If it isn't broken why mend it?" He also said that since he believed inherited titles were "inextricably" tied to the monarchy that it was "odd that they just want to touch one institution and not the other". He also claimed that the House of Lords had developed a "wealth of experience". In 1985 he was elected a Vice-Chancellor of the reactionary International Monarchist League.
From the early 1970s, Sudeley was active in the Conservative Monday Club of which he became president in February 1991. He wrote for them a leading essay on "The Role of Heredity in Politics", produced a Club Policy Paper against Lords Reform in December 1979, and in 1991 they published his booklet titled, and arguing for, The Preservation of the House of Lords, with a foreword by parliamentarian John Stokes.
Racism and praise of Hitler
Sudelely's reputation was possibly affected by racist comments he made in speeches and reports. On 2 June 2006, The Times quoted him as stating, in a report of the Monday Club's Annual General Meeting, that "Hitler did well to get everyone back to work". It also reported him saying that "True though the fact may be that some races are superior to others", going on to suggest that such rhetoric might interfere with the Monday Club's hopes of being accepted again in Conservative Party circles.
In September 2001, the Conservative Party leadership candidate Iain Duncan Smith said the Monday Club was a "viable organisation… in a sense what the party is about". However, six weeks later, after becoming leader, he publicly distanced the party from the Monday Club until it ceased to "promulgate or discuss policies relating to race"; he also indicated that no Conservative MPs should contribute to Right Now!, a quarterly magazine of which Lord Sudeley was a Patron, after an article in it described Nelson Mandela as a "terrorist".
Lord Sudeley was also a vice-president of the now-defunct Western Goals Institute.
Lord Sudeley was also Patron of the Bankruptcy Association (Lloyds Bank foreclosed upon Charles Hanbury-Tracy, 4th Baron Sudeley in 1893, when his debt was covered twice over by large assets) and Convenor of the Forum for Stable Currencies. He was also Lay Patron of the Prayer Book Society and a past President of the Powysland Club.
Hobbies
Lord Sudeley once described in Who's Who one of his hobbies as "Ancestor Worship", with "Conversation" being listed in Debrett's. He took great pride in the former family seat of Toddington Manor in Gloucestershire which the family was later forced to sell. In its successful blend of the Perpendicular Gothic and Picturesque styles, Toddington is the fore-runner of the Houses of Parliament when the soon-to-be 1st Lord Sudeley was selected as chairman of the new parliamentary committee to settle upon the design. His contributions based upon Toddington's were accepted and enhanced.
At Easter 1985, in conjunction with the century-old Manorial Society of Great Britain (of which he sat on the Governing Council), Sudeley held a conference at his old home, the proceedings published in a volume entitled The Sudeleys - Lords of Toddington, taking the history of his family back to Thomas Becket's murder and ultimately to Charlemagne. On 21 November 2006, he arranged a further conference at the Society of Antiquaries of London on "Visual Aspects of Toddington in the 19th century".
Lord Sudeley has written many published essays, including a history of the English gentleman for a German pharmaceutical magazine, Die Waage. He also wrote a history of the House of Lords in which he promoted its Tory (as opposed to Whig history) interpretation, entitled Peers Through the Mist of Time,. A launch for his book took place at the Brooks's Club in London on 28 September 2018. In his 2021 book Toddington, the Unforgotten Forerunner, Sudeley tells the story of his family's former seat, designed in a blend of Perpendicular Gothic and Picturesque by Charles Hanbury-Tracy, later Chairman of the Commission for the Rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament in the same style, and its tragic and unexplained loss. He is also the author of a satire on Greek mythology (published in John Pudney's famous Pick of Today's Short Stories) and a quantity of politically incorrect short stories mostly published in the London Miscellany magazine. In recent years Sudeley style-edited a definitive monograph on Azerbaijan's architecture, translated from the Russian.
Personal life
Lord Sudeley lived in a mansion flat in Dorset Square, London. He had been married three times and divorced twice.
Sudeley married his first wife on 18 January 1980 (dissolved 1988), Elizabeth Mairi Villiers (3 November 1941 – 29 September 2014), daughter of Derek William Charles Keppel, Viscount Bury (heir-apparent of the 9th Earl of Albemarle) and Lady Mairi Vane-Tempest-Stewart (youngest daughter of the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, and ex-wife of Alastair Michael Hyde Villiers, a Partner in Panmure Gordon & Company, stockbrokers.
Sudeley was married secondly in 1999 (dissolved 2006) to Margarita (born 1962) daughter of Nikolai Danko, and ex-wife of Lloyd's broker Nigel Kellett.
Sudeley married a third time, in 2010, Dr Tatiana Dudina (born 19 August 1950), daughter of Russian Colonel Boris Dudin and Galina Veselovskaya. Dr Dudina holds a doctorate in philology from Moscow State Linguistic University.
Death
Lord Sudeley died on 5 September 2022, at the age of 83. He was succeeded in the Barony of Sudeley by his third cousin once removed, Nicholas Hanbury-Tracy.