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Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich, (22 February 1890 – 1 January 1954), known as Duff Cooper, was a British Conservative Party politician and diplomat who was also a military and political historian and writer.
First elected to Parliament in 1924, he lost his seat in 1929 but returned to Parliament in the 1931 Westminster St George's by-election, which was seen as a referendum on Stanley Baldwin's leadership of the Conservative Party. He later served in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty. He resigned from the cabinet over the Munich Agreement of 1938.
When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he named Cooper as Minister of Information. In 1941, as a member of the Cabinet, Cooper served as British Minister in Singapore before its fall to the Japanese. He later served an important role as representative to Charles de Gaulle's Free France (1943–1944) and ambassador to France from 1944 to 1948.
Following Oxford, Cooper entered the Foreign Service in October 1913, at the third attempt. During the war, he worked in the commercial and the contraband departments. Owing to the national importance of his work at the cipher desk, he was exempted from military service until June 1917, when he joined the Grenadier Guards. He had not actively sought to join the army but was happy to be "released" as a result of the manpower shortage, as he thought joining the Army the decent thing to do. To his surprise, most of his fellow officer cadets were working-class and lower-middle-class men, almost all of whom had already served in the ranks.
Cooper spent six months on the Western Front during which he, Philip Ziegler wrote, proved himself "exceptionally courageous, resourceful, and a natural leader of men" when the life expectancy of junior officers was very brief. He suffered a minor wound in the advance to the Albert Canal in August 1918 and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for conspicuous gallantry, a rare decoration for a junior officer. The citation for his DSO appeared in The London Gazette in November 1918 and reads as follows:
Almost all of his closest friends, including Shaw-Stewart, Horner and Asquith, were killed in the war, which allowed him to draw closer to Lady Diana Manners, a socialite who was known for her eccentricities.
On 2 June 1919, he married Lady Diana Manners, whose family were initially opposed to the match. Diana's mother, in particular, thought Cooper a promiscuous drinker and gambler, who was without title, position or wealth. Diana was officially the daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland but was widely believed, by herself included, to be the natural daughter of Harry Cust, a Belvoir Castle neighbour and MP. In 1923, Lady Diana played the Madonna in the Max Reinhardt play The Miracle. The money which she earned enabled Cooper to resign from the Foreign Office in July 1924.
Lady Diana tolerated Cooper's numerous affairs. They included the Franco-American Singer sewing-machine heiress Daisy Fellowes, the socialite Gloria Guinness, the French novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin and the writer Susan Mary Alsop (then an American diplomat's wife, by whom he had an illegitimate son, William Patten Jr, who later fathered W. Samuel Patten). The polo player Boy Capel's wife, Diana, and the Anglo-Irish socialite and fashion model Maxime de la Falaise were two more, but Lady Diana reportedly did not mind and loved him nonetheless; she explained to their son: "They were the flowers, but I was the tree".
John Julius, his only legitimate child, was born in 1929. Out of Parliament, Cooper wrote a biography of the French statesman Talleyrand, Napoleon's famous chief diplomat. He wrote slowly but seldom needed to revise his drafts. Ziegler writes that "rarely can subject and author have been more satisfactorily matched" as both men were worldly and disliked cant. The book was eventually published in 1932 by his nephew Rupert Hart-Davis to critical praise and lasting success.
In August 1931, on the formation of the National Government, he was appointed Financial Secretary to the War Office under the elderly Lord Crewe, who left Cooper to do a great deal of the work. In June 1934 he was appointed Financial Secretary to the Treasury, a traditional stepping stone to the Cabinet. This brought him close to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain, who thought highly of him. He had been to Nazi Germany and had seen and been appalled by a Nuremberg Rally. Chamberlain told him to tone down his criticisms of Hitler. Cooper urged rearmament, which was not then a fashionable view, and briefed Winston Churchill, who was then on the backbenches, that Hitler seriously wanted war.
Stephen Heathorn describes Cooper's biography as "the apogee of the admiring biography of", following in the tradition of previous works by Dewar & Boraston (1922), George Arthur (1928) and John Charteris (1929). He stressed Haig's strong and upright character, as if he were writing about a Victorian hero. He wrote that there was "no room for thoughts of petty malice or of mean revenge in that high and honourable man" (Vol. 2, p. 98) and that "in moral stature Haig was a giant" (pp. 440–1). David Lloyd George's memoirs were appearing as Cooper was writing and some of his book was devoted to addressing Lloyd George's arguments. Cooper argued that Haig's offensive on the Somme saved the French at Verdun, Haig improved Anglo-French relations and Haig defeated the Germans through inflicting attrition on them on the Somme and at Ypres. The book received many generous reviews and remained the leading biography of Haig until John Terraine's The Educated Soldier in 1963.
Historians' view of Haig would be dramatically changed by the 1952 publication of his Private Papers, which revealed his political intrigues, and his privately-uncharitable view of various British officers and politicians and of the French in general. At the time, Cooper admitted to Robert Blake, the editor of that work, that he had been influenced by the politics of the 1930s and the desire to facilitate Anglo-French rapprochement. Modern views of Cooper's biography are less favourable: George Egerton, writing in The Journal of Modern History in 1988, detected a conflict between Cooper the writer, who concealed the degree to which Haig, like everybody else, was dwarfed by events, and the historian, who was too honest to pretend that he dominated them. Ziegler wrote that the book was criticised for pro-Haig bias and what Ziegler calls the "lack of consideration".
He felt out of kilter with the Conservative leadership and was surprised when the new prime minister Neville, Chamberlain, appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty in May 1937. Ziegler wrote that his tenure of office was "an unequivocal success". Cooper enjoyed high living on board the Admiralty yacht HMS Enchantress but fought Chamberlain and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon for more spending on the Royal Navy. Chamberlain saw him as indiscreet and as a firebrand. By the time of the Munich Agreement, Cooper was isolated in the Cabinet as the most public critic of Chamberlain's appeasement policy.
On 3 October 1938, a few days after the Munich Agreement, he denounced it and resigned from the Cabinet. On doing, so he said that "war with honour or peace with dishonour" he might have been persuaded to accept, "but war with dishonour—that was too much". The fellow opponent of appeasement and Conservative Party MP Vyvyan Adams described Cooper's actions as "the first step in the road back to national sanity".
As a backbencher, Cooper joined the coterie around Anthony Eden, who had resigned as Foreign Secretary in February 1938, but Cooper made only muted criticisms of the government. His main source of income was writing articles for the Evening Standard. He argued for an Anglo-French alliance.
From May 1940, he was Minister of Information under Churchill, but disliked the job. His son John Julius said that his father was "out of sympathy" with the job from the beginning because he was opposed to censorship. The press, led by the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook and his Daily Express, portrayed Cooper as a spin doctor and as an enemy of a free press. His Wartime Social Survey inquirers into the state of public morale were known as "Cooper's snoopers". He authorised a strong denunciation of the author P. G. Wodehouse for making an ill-advised humorous broadcast from Berlin. He and Lady Diana sent their eleven-year-old son John Julius to the US in 1940, as they feared that Cooper's being on Hitler's blacklist might lead to their son being killed or taken as a hostage in the event of a German invasion. Many of Cooper's friends and colleagues took a dim view, and it earned Cooper further criticism in the press and some hostile questioning from MPs in Parliament. John Julius returned two years later.
Cooper was sent to Singapore as Minister Resident, charged with reporting on the situation in the Far East and the state of British defences. He had the authority to form a War Cabinet there, but both military and civil authorities were reluctant to cooperate with him. To his relief, Archibald Wavell was appointed Supreme Commander ABDA. He was, unfairly in Ziegler's view, blamed for the fall of Singapore after his return to the UK and was not given another major post for a year and a half. In the meantime he chaired the Cabinet Committee on Security and did much writing. He spent his weekends at Bognor Regis, where his wife had a smallholding.
Despite being a Conservative, Cooper was not replaced as Ambassador when Labour won the 1945 election as Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary, valued an ambassador who was close friends with so many French politicians and even managed to have a friendship of sorts with de Gaulle. In January 1947, Cooper, acting without orders, began the process that led to the Treaty of Dunkirk when he suggested to French Prime Minister Leon Blum that there should an Anglo-French military alliance. Blum took up the idea since he thought it to be an offer from London. The treaty, which fulfilled Cooper's long-held desire for an Anglo-French alliance, was signed on 4 March 1947.
Cooper's term as ambassador ended at the end of 1947. He bequeathed a large part of his library to the British Embassy in Paris. To the dismay of his successor, Cooper remained in Paris and at the Château Saint-Firmin, in Chantilly Park.
He was created Viscount Norwich of Aldwick in the Sussex, in 1952, in recognition of his political and literary career. The title was not popular with some of the local dignitaries. His wife refused to be called Lady Norwich; she claimed that it sounded too much like "porridge" and promptly took out a newspaper advertisement declaring that she would retain her previous style of Lady Diana Cooper. Cooper's sixth and final book was his acclaimed memoirs, Old Men Forget, which appeared on 5 July 1953. The Duff Cooper Diaries: 1915–1951, edited by his son John Julius Norwich, appeared posthumously in 2005.
On 28 November 2021, Cooper was posthumously awarded the Order of the White Lion, the highest decoration of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, in recognition of his opposition to the Munich Agreement.
One of Cooper's maternal great-great-grandfathers was King William IV. He fathered eight illegitimate children with Dorothea Jordan, including Lady Elizabeth FitzClarence. She married William Hay, 18th Earl of Erroll, and one of their children was Lady Agnes Hay, Cooper's grandmother. Lady Agnes married James Duff, 5th Earl Fife, and they had five children including Cooper's mother, Lady Agnes Duff. Cooper's sister Stephanie was the paternal great-grandmother of prime minister David Cameron.
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