Reginald Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Dilhorne

Born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, Manningham-Buller was the only son of Sir Mervyn Manningham-Buller, 3rd Baronet, grandson of Sir Edward Manningham-Buller, 1st Baronet, of Dilhorne Hall, Staffordshire, a junior member of the Yarde-Buller family headed by Baron Churston. His mother was the Hon. Lilah Constance, Lady Manningham-Buller , daughter of Charles Cavendish, 3rd Baron Chesham and granddaughter of Hugh Grosvenor, 1st Duke of Westminster. His uncle's seat of Dilhorne Hall having passed to an heiress ineligible for the baronetcy, Manningham-Buller grew up in Northamptonshire. (Although pronounced "Dill-horn" by locals in later years, he preferred the older pronunciation of "Dill-urn".) He was educated at Eton College, where he caused a fellow pupil to be expelled for making advances to another boy. He then attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a Third in Law, before being called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1927. ==Political career==

Manningham-Buller was elected to the House of Commons in a 1943 by-election as member of parliament (MP) for Daventry. and was knighted; in 1954 he was sworn into the Privy Council and became the Attorney General for England and Wales. In 1956 he succeeded his father in his baronetcy. Devlin also criticised Manningham-Buller for his uncharacteristic weakness at a crucial moment in the Morrell case: evidence (some nurses' notebooks) that had gone missing from the Director of Public Prosecutions's files, turned up in the hands of the defence on the second day of the trial. Manningham-Buller claimed he had not seen them before but failed to halt their admission as evidence, or ask for time to acquaint himself with their contents. They were subsequently used by the defence to throw doubt on the accuracy of the testimony of various nurses who had worked with Adams and who had questioned his methods and intentions. This damaged the prosecution tremendously, fatally scuppering the case. Manningham-Buller's handling of the case later provoked questions in the House of Commons. Indeed, on 8 November 1956, Manningham-Buller himself had handed a copy of Hannam's 187-page report to the President of the British Medical Association (BMA), effectively the doctors' trade union in Britain. This document – the prosecution's most valuable document – was in the hands of the defence, a situation that led the Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd-George, to reprimand Manningham-Buller, stating that such documents should not even be shown to "Parliament or to individual Members". "I can only hope that no harm will result" since "the disclosure of this document is likely to cause me considerable embarrassment". == Lord chancellorship ==

He continued as Attorney-General under Sir Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan until July 1962, when he was rather abruptly made Lord Chancellor and sent to the House of Lords to replace Lord Kilmuir. On his appointment, he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Dilhorne, of Towcester in the County of Northampton on 17 July 1962. Retained, after Macmillan's retirement, in the cabinet of Alec Douglas-Home, when the Conservatives lost the election of 1964 he was created Viscount Dilhorne, of Greens Norton in the County of Northampton on 7 December, becoming the Deputy Leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords. In 1969 he was named a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and continued in this capacity until retiring when he turned 75, in August 1980. == Post-lord chancellorship ==

In the late 1960s, Dilhorne was the chief opponent in the House of Lords of legislation to legalise homosexual acts between consenting men. ==Bullying manner==

In the late 1950s, Bernard Levin gave Manningham-Buller the nickname "Bullying-Manner" in his Parliamentary sketch. When Manningham-Buller was elevated to the peerage as Lord Dilhorne, Levin renamed him Lord Stillborn. Lord Devlin, judge in the Adams case, described Buller's technique thus: "He could be downright rude but he did not shout or bluster. Yet his disagreeableness was so pervasive, his persistence so interminable, the obstructions he manned so far flung, his objectives apparently so insignificant, that sooner or later you would be tempted to ask yourself whether the game was worth the candle: if you asked yourself that, you were finished." Manningham-Buller was one of the inspirations for the character of Kenneth Widmerpool in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. ==Personal life==

Manningham-Buller married Lady Mary Lilian Lindsay (1910–2004), daughter of David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford, in 1930. They had a son and three daughters: • John Mervyn Manningham-Buller, 2nd Viscount Dilhorne (28 February 1932 – 25 June 2022) • Hon. Marion Cynthia Manningham-Buller (26 November 1934 – 10 August 2013), married Edmund Crispin Stephen James George Brudenell. • Elizabeth Lydia Manningham-Buller, Baroness Manningham-Buller (born 14 July 1948) • Hon. Anne Constance Manningham-Buller (born 13 August 1951), married Sir John Christopher Parsons, KCVO. Manningham-Buller died in Knoydart, in the Scottish Highlands, on 7 September 1980, aged 75, and was interred in Deene, Northamptonshire. He was succeeded in the viscountcy by his only son, John. His second daughter was the Director-General of MI5 from 2002 to 2007 and in 2008 was awarded a life peerage, becoming The Right Honourable The Baroness Manningham-Buller, DCB. His granddaughter is model and media personality Lilah Parsons. == Notes ==