1948 Onwards
Finding peacetime duties unexciting, Hastings left the Army in 1948. He turned down an offer from Gillette and was refused a job by the BBC. Eventually he was invited by a friend to join MI6, which sent him in 1950 to Finland, disguised as an assistant military attaché. Four years later he moved to Paris, where he observed the conspiracy over the Suez operation and the machinations that preceded Charles de Gaulle's return to power. From 1958 to 1960, he worked in the political office of the Middle East forces in Cyprus. As a result of his work countering the KGB, Hastings was one of the few Englishmen of his class and age to enjoy vodka neat, as well as the company of all and sundry. He, like his wife Elizabeth Anne, was utterly unsnobbish.
The unproven imputations put forward in the book Spycatcher, in which Stephen Hastings was portrayed as participating in an attempt to destabilise the Harold Wilson government were always vehemently denied by him. The book's author, the late Peter Wright, was regularly denounced by Hastings as "that traitor", though one was never quite sure as to exactly what betrayal Sir Stephen was alluding.
His disgust at Suez led to his putting his name down with Conservative Central Office as a candidate, and in 1960 he was offered the safe seat of Mid-Bedfordshire. He entered Parliament the same year in a by-election. Hastings quickly established his credentials on the Right of the party, becoming a stalwart of the Monday Club and an ally of the likes of Julian Amery and Ronald Bell. He served on various backbench committees, becoming a member of the executive of the 1922 Committee and vice-chairman of the Conservative backbench Foreign Affairs Committee.
He could be a remarkably effective Commons performer. His self-confident, upper-class drawl and theatrical oratorical style seemed to have been purposely designed to enrage Labour Party MPs. His special parliamentary gambit was demanding and getting emergency debates; and he was adept at the shrewd thrust when questioning ministers.
Hastings's background in MI6 gave him a certain mystique, and he was often embroiled in controversy concerning Communist infiltration. In 1977 he raised a storm of protest by alleging that five prominent trades union officials were agents for communist countries. This information was culled from tape recordings made by the Czech former spy and defector Joseph Frolik.
The following year, before Margaret Thatcher came into office, Hastings and Brian Crozier wrote her a paper setting out "the diabolical nature of the Communist conspiracy" against Britain. Mrs Thatcher was appalled: "Stephen," she said, "I've read every word and I'm shattered. What should we do?"
At Hastings's suggestion she appointed a committee comprising Willie Whitelaw, Lord Carrington, Sir Keith Joseph and Hastings himself. This came up with the idea of forming a counter-subversion executive - a sort of Cold War equivalent of SOE. But the scheme was quietly dropped after the Tories came to power in 1979.
In 1986 Hastings successfully sued The Observer for libel following allegations that he had been one of two Conservative MPs involved in an MI5 plot to oust Harold Wilson.
Hastings remained a friend of Margaret Thatcher after his retirement from the Commons in 1983. He and his wife Elizabeth Anne entertained the Thatchers and other notables at Milton Hall, the largest private house in Cambridgeshire. In 1982 Margaret and her husband Denis were at dinner with Stephen and Elizabeth Anne at Milton when the butler entered to ask the Prime Minister to the telephone, by which Margaret was informed of Argentina's invasion of the British South Atlantic island of South Georgia. This marked the start of the Falklands War exactly two weeks later on 2 April with the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands.
Outside his parliamentary duties, Hastings continued to ride, hunting regularly with the Fitzwilliam and other hunts. In 1982 he was elected chairman of the British Field Sports Society in succession to Sir Marcus Kimball. After retiring from Parliament, he became a partner and manager of the Milton Park Stud, a member of the council of the Thoroughbred Breeders' Association, and joint master of the Fitzwilliam Hunt. He had maintained his lifelong love of racing and each evening before dinner, a glass of champagne in hand, he would watch the races of the day, prerecorded by his butler.
Hastings was chairman of the Peterborough Cathedral Development and Preservation Trust and helped raise millions of pounds for the Cathedral's restoration. He was patron of 32 livings, and took his duty to help provide priests for his parishes seriously. He and Elizabeth Anne could be found in the squire's pew at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Marholm, any Sunday they were at Milton.
Hastings was an accomplished painter, a fine sculptor, and wrote two books, The Murder of TSR2 (1966) and a well-received autobiography, The Drums of Memory (1995). He regularly skied in Switzerland until he was in his ninth decade, and hunted with the Fitzwilliam on his magnificent grey hunter over forty times in the year before his death.
Stephen Hastings married first, in 1948 (dissolved 1971), Harriet Tomlin, with whom he had a son Neil and a daughter Carola. He married secondly, in 1975, Elizabeth Anne Marie Gabrielle, the former Lady Naylor-Leyland. Lady Hastings was born the younger daughter of the 2nd and last Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent and Joyce Langdale of Houghton Hall, West Riding, Yorkshire, who secondly married Thomas Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 10th and last Earl Fitzwilliam.
In 1979 Lord Fizwilliam left the bulk of his great art collection and the estates of Milton, Cambridgeshire, Wentworth Woodhouse, near Doncaster, and Malton, North Yorkshire, as well as a grand town house in Belgrave Square to his widow, and to Elizabeth Anne, who was widely known in society as the daughter of Lord Fitzwilliam, a fact which she was known to confirm from time to time, though with reservations. Lady Hastings died from cancer at Milton in 1997. Her funeral at St Kyneburgha's Church, Castor, was attended by 800 mourners.
Lady Hastings was succeeded in her stewardship of the Fitzwilliam heritage by her son, Sir Philip Naylor-Leyland, Bt.
Sir Stephen Hastings died on 10 January 2005 at Stibbington House, Cambridgeshire, from oesophageal cancer.
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