Toby Low, 1. Baron Aldington

Toby Austin Richard William Low, 1st Baron Aldington and Baron Low, KCMG, CBE, DSO, TD, PC (25 May 1914 – 7 December 2000) was a British Conservative Party politician and businessman.

Life

He was the son of Colonel Stuart Low, who died in action in 1942, and Lucy Atkin, daughter of the Lord Atkin. He was educated at Winchester College and at New College, Oxford. He qualified as a barrister in 1939. He had joined the King's Royal Rifle Corps in 1934 and served in World War II in Greece, Crete, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Italy and Austria, becoming a Brigadier in 1944. He was the youngest Brigadier in the British Army at that time. He worked in Europe following the German surrender. He was appointed to the Distinguished Service Order, made a Commander of the Legion of Merit (USA) and awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Low stood for Parliament in the 1945 general election, and won the seat of Blackpool North. He served as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Supply 1951-4 and Minister of State at the Board of Trade from 1954, becoming a Privy Counsellor. In 1957, he was knighted and became chair of the Select Committee on nationalised industry. In 1959, he became deputy Conservative Party chairman.

In 1962 he was created Baron Aldington, of Bispham in the County Borough of Blackpool, and increased his business interests, serving as the chairman of several companies. He had been a director of the family banking company, Grindlay's Bank, in 1946, following his father and grandfather. In 1964, he became Chairman of the bank as well as of GEC. In 1971, he joined the BBC general advisory council, and became chairman of Sun-Alliance and the Port of London Authority. In 1972, he became co-chairman, with Jack Jones, of the joint special committee on the ports industry. He became chairman of Westland in 1977.

Lord Aldington was considered a One Nation Conservative and supported British involvement in the European Union. He continued political activities in the House of Lords, including as chairman of the Lords' select committee on overseas trade. He was also a Deputy Lieutenant of Kent.

In 1999, when hereditary peers were excluded from the House of Lords by the House of Lords Act 1999, as a hereditary peer of first creation he was granted a life peerage as Baron Low, of Bispham in the County of Lancashire, so that he could remain.

Family

Aldington married (Felicité Ann) Araminta MacMichael (a daughter of Sir Harold MacMichael) on 10 April 1947. They had two daughters, (Priscilla) Jane Stephanie and (Lucy) Ann Anthea, and a son, Charles Harold Stuart.

Libel case

In 1989 Lord Aldington initiated and won a record £1.5million (plus £500,000 costs) in a libel case against Count Nikolai Tolstoy, who had accused him of war crimes in Austria during the Second World War.

Tolstoy had written several books about the alleged complicity by British politicians and officers with Stalin's forces in the murder of Cossacks, Croatian para-military and civilian fugitives from Tito, as well as 11000 Slovenian anticommunist fighters. After their repatriation, their slaughter began almost immediately. For seven years after Aldington won the case, Tolstoy avoided payment by making appeals to 15 courts in Britain and Europe, including a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that the size of the award violated his right to freedom of expression. Nigel Watts, who was in dispute with one of Lord Aldington's former companies, used this information to further his own case, printing 10,000 leaflets about Aldington's role in the matter and circulating them to politicians and other figures.

Tolstoy insisted on being sued alongside Watts and, despite two efforts by Aldington to avoid this, fought the issue hard with the support of right-wing Tories, including the Leader of the House of Lords, Lord Cranborne, and international public figures ranging from Nigel Nicolson and Graham Greene to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Lord Aldington meanwhile had the assistance of the government and then-mainstream Conservative Party, so that the case became somewhat of a 9-week civil war within the Party. Despite Aldington's winning the case, Watts was jailed for 18 months in April 1995, after repeating the libellous claim that Aldington was a war criminal in a pamphlet.

External link

• Announcement of his taking the oath under his new title at the House of Lords