Sir Harold Anthony Nutting, 3rd Baronet (11 January 1920 – 24 February 1999) was a British diplomat and Conservative Party politician.
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Nutting was born on 11 January 1920, the son of Sir Harold Stanmore Nutting, 2nd Bt. a wealthy family who owned estates in England and Scotland. He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied agriculture and kept a pack of hounds.
When World War II broke out, he joined the Leicestershire Yeomanry, but he had to be invalided out a year later after a steeplechase accident, and he entered the Foreign Service. Both of his elder brothers were killed on active duty. He served as an attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. When France fell in World War II he was assigned to the embassy in Madrid, where he organized escape routes for Allied servicemen caught behind enemy lines from 1940 to 1944 . He joined the Embassy in Rome in 1944-45.
He married his first wife, Gillian Leonora Strutt, with whom he had three children, John, David and Zara, they divorced however in 1959. He married his second wife, Anne Gunning Parker, in 1961, he later married his third wife Margarita.
At the 1945 general election, aged 25, Nutting was elected as Member of Parliament for Melton a constituency in the heart of famous hunting country and it was said of it that "most of the voters are foxes!". He served as chairman of the Young Conservatives 1946-47 and he was the youngest member of Winston Churchill's Government after World War II. He was made a Privy Councillor in 1954 and he led the British delegation to the United Nations General Assembly and Disarmament Commission in 1954 and 1955. He was an internationalist, an early enthusiast for British membership of the European Economic Community and an Arabist who was a founding member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) in 1967. In the worlds of the political writer Peter Kellner:
"He belonged to, and was set fair to lead, a new generation of post-war Tories: moderate, inclusive and internationalist. He preferred the spirit of the United Nations Charter to the ethos of empire. He understood earlier than most of his contemporaries that Britain needed to find a new role in the world."
In 1954 he negotiated the final steps of the treaty with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt under which British troops withdrew from Suez; so when he discovered the joint British and French invasion plan at a meeting on the 14 October 1956 he believed that the mission was mistaken and deceitful. On the 31 October, after failed attempts by Harold Macmillan, the future Prime Minister, to persuade him not to resign telling him that "you will lead the party one day". Nutting resigned his post as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs but for security reasons, he did not give the customary resignation speech to the House of Commons, and his unexplained action proved so unpopular that his constituents forced him to give up his seat in Parliament. He later wrote of feeling suddenly "bereft of friends... a castaway adrift on a sea of anger and recrimination, an object of distrust... torn between loyalty to principle and loyalty to friends and associates."[1]
Sir Anthony kept his silence over the Suez Crisis until 1967 when in his book No End of a Lesson, he explained that backing the Suez action would have put him in the position of lying to the House of Commons and the United Nations.
"Either I had to tell the whole story as I saw it, or say nothing at all," he wrote. "And as long as any of the chief protagonists of the Suez war still held high office in Britain it would clearly have been a grave disservice to the nation, which they still led and represented in the councils of the world, to have told the whole story." The Suez Crisis had caused so much bitterness that even eleven years after his resignation he came under pressure from the Cabinet Secretary not to proceed and there was even a threat of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.
In his later years, still a political outcast, he divided his time between writing biographies and histories in London, fox hunting in Shropshire, and farming at Achentoul in Scotland.
He died on 24 February 1999 at his London home of heart failure.
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Sir William Lindsay Everard |
Member of Parliament for Melton 1945–1956 |
Succeeded by Irene Mervyn Parnicott Pike |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by The Lord Henderson Ernest Davies |
Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1951–1954 with The Marquess of Reading 1951–1953 Douglas Dodds-Parker 1953–1954 |
Succeeded by Robin Turton |
| Preceded by Selwyn Lloyd The Marquess of Reading |
Minister of State for Foreign Affairs with The Marquess of Reading 1954–1956 |
Succeeded by The Marquess of Reading Allan Noble |
| Baronetage of the United Kingdom | ||
| Preceded by Harold Stansmore Nutting |
Baronet (of St Helens) 1972–1999 |
Succeeded by John Grenfell Nutting |