Henry Hopkinson, 1st Baron Colyton

Who was Henry Hopkinson, 1st Baron Colyton?

Henry Lennox D'Aubigne Hopkinson, 1st Baron Colyton PC, was a British diplomat and Conservative politician.

Colyton was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and then joined the Diplomatic Service. He served in various positions at the British embassies in Washington and Stockholm and was also assistant private secretary to the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, from 1932 to 1934 and First Secretary to the War Cabinet Office from 1939 to 1940. He then served as private secretary to the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Alexander Cadogan, between 1940 and 1941 and to Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of State in the Middle East, from 1941 to 1943, being posted to Cairo. Colyton was stationed in Lisbon from 1943 to 1944 and from 1944 to 1946 he served as Deputy High Commissioner and Vice-President of the Allied Commission in Italy.

He resigned from the Diplomatic Service the latter year to work for the Conservative Party and was Head of the Conservative Parliamentary Secretariat and Joint Director of the Conservative Research Department between 1946 and 1949. The following year, in 1950, he was elected Member of Parliament for Taunton, a seat he held until 1956, and served under Winston Churchill as Secretary for Overseas Trade from 1951 to 1952 and as Minister of State for Colonial Affairs from 1952 to 1955. Hopkinson was also a Delegate to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe from 1950 to 1952 and to the General Assembly of the United Nations from 1952 to 1955. He was admitted to the Privy Council in 1952 and in 1956 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Colyton, of Farway in the County of Devon and of Taunton in the County of Somerset.