Archibald Sinclair, 1st Viscount Thurso

Archibald Henry Macdonald Sinclair, 1st Viscount Thurso KT CMG PC (October 22 1890–June 15 1970), known as Sir Archibald Sinclair from 1912 until 1952, was a British politician and leader of the UK Liberal Party.

Educated at Eton, Sinclair served on the Western Front during the First World War and rose to the rank of Major in the Guards Machine Gun Regiment. He served as second in command to Winston Churchill when Churchill commanded the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in the Ploegsteert Wood sector of the Western Front in 1915, Churchill having been disgraced after Gallipoli. They formed a lasting friendship that would become a significant political alliance in later decades.

In 1922 he entered the House of Commons as a Liberal MP for Caithness and Sutherland supporting David Lloyd George, defeating the incumbent Liberal supporter of Herbert Henry Asquith. He rose through the Liberal ranks as the party shrank in Parliament, becoming Chief Whip by 1930. In 1931 the Liberal Party joined the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald and Sinclair held the post of Secretary of State for Scotland. The following year he, together with other Liberal ministers, resigned from the government in protest at the Ottawa Conference introducing a series of tariff agreements. Sinclair and the Liberal leader, Sir Herbert Samuel, were thus the last Liberal politicians to sit in the Cabinet.

In the 1935 general election, Samuel lost his seat. Sinclair became the party's leader at the head of only twenty MPs. With the party now clearly marginalised as a third party on the fringe, with few distinct domestic policies, with a parliamentary party that was primarily a collection of individuals elected as much for themselves as for their party, and with the separate Liberal Nationals offering competition amongst Liberal inclined voters, Sinclair fought to make the Liberals once more a relevant force in British politics, taking up the issues of opposition to the continental dictatorships and working worked closely with Winston Churchill who was a backbencher at that time and generally shunned by his Conservative Party. When Churchill formed an all-party coalition government in 1940, Sinclair became Secretary of State for Air. However he did not sit in the small War Cabinet, though he was invited to attend meetings discussing any political matter. As Secretary for Air, he played a leading role in planning the firebombing and destruction of Dresden. He remained a minister until May 1945 when the coalition ended. In the 1945 general election, he narrowly lost his seat. His margin of defeat is one of the tightest on record - he came third, even though the victor had only 59 votes more than him.

There was speculation that he might return to the Commons and the leadership, as the Conservative victor in his seat had promised to only serve in parliament until the end of war with Japan, a pledge he kept modifying to serving just one more year, every year. Sinclair awaited the imminent by-election, which never materialised. At the 1950 general election Sinclair again stood for his old seat and moved to second place, but in yet another close election, he was 269 votes away from victory. In 1952 he accepted elevation to the House of Lords as Viscount Thurso. He was expected to take up the leadership of the Liberal group in the House of Lords, but a series of strokes in the mid-fifties left him in a state of precarious health until his death in 1970.

In the 1990s, his grandson, John Thurso entered politics and now sits as a Liberal Democrat MP for his grandfather's seat, now called Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross. Sinclair's granddaughter Veronica Linklater, Baroness Linklater of Butterstone, is also a Liberal Democrat politician.

Further reading

• Violet Bonham Carter, ed. Mark Pottle, Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries of Violet Bonham Carter 1914-1945 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998)
• Gerard DeGroot, Liberal Crusader: The Life of Sir Archibald Sinclair (New York University Press, 1993)
• ed. Ian Hunter, Winston and Archie: The collected correspondence of Winston Churchill and Sir Archibald Sinclair (Politico's, 2005)

External link

• Sir Archibald Sinclair (Viscount Thurso) 1890-1970 biography from the Liberal Democrat History Group