As a penal reformer, socialist peer and minister in both Attlee and Wilson’s governments, Lord Longford is remembered by his daughter as someone who never minded seeming ridiculous for a good cause

I was a war baby, born in 1942. War babies are special. They look back to the pre-war years before they were born and they grow up in the time after the war. In 1945 my father, Frank Pakenham, who had failed to be elected as a Labour MP, was made a peer so that, from the House of Lords, he could be part of Clement Attlee’s government. The thinking was that as my father was due to inherit an earldom at some point, since his eldest brother had no children, he might as well start in the Lords right away. So he became Baron Pakenham of Cowley in the city of Oxford. At that point no one had thought of renouncing a title, or at least my father hadn’t. So I grew up with a socialist father called Lord Pakenham, a Labour ­minister, later created leader of the House of Lords.

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