Richard Needham takes a businesslike attitude to the Troubles

This memoir from Sir Richard Needham, 6th Earl of Kilmorey, businessman and former Northern Ireland minister, has a frank opening: ‘I came from a family of barely solvent aristocrats, who distrusted trade and despised politics. For some inexplicable reason, however, I had always been fascinated by both.’ Although generations of Needhams before him had ‘uneventful’ military careers, at 15 Richard decided upon an alternative plan: ‘I would first make some money, and then enter politics and change the world.’ What follows is the tale of how that scheme played out.

The literary quality of political diaries can be hit and miss; but Needham is a skilled storyteller, who can deftly sketch a character or situation in a few pithy phrases. He is fond but unsparing of his parents, for example, who were grand but hopeless with money. His father was of ‘the gently indolent variety of Needhams’, selling off the title’s Northern Irish house and acres for £100,000 and a pillowcase full of heirlooms, while his stylish mother ‘occasionally liked the boys and the booze more than was sensible’.