of his work countering the KGB, Hastings was one of the few Englishmen of his class and age to enjoy vodka neat, as well as the company of all and sundry. He, like his wife Elizabeth, was utterly unsnobbish. The unproven imputations put forward in the book Spycatcher, in which Hastings was portrayed as participating in an attempt to destabilise the Harold Wilson government were always vehemently denied by him. The book's author, Peter Wright, was regularly denounced by Hastings as "that traitor", though no one knew exactly to what betrayal he was referring. His disgust at the Suez Crisis led to his putting his name down with Conservative Central Office as a candidate, and in 1960 he was offered the safe seat of Mid Bedfordshire; He won a 1960 by-election caused by the elevation to the peerage of Alan Lennox-Boyd. He retained his seat in the subsequent general elections in 1964, 1966, 1970, February 1974, October 1974, and 1979, but stood down at the 1983 general election, when he was succeeded by fellow-Conservative Sir Nicholas Lyell. Hastings quickly established his credentials on the Right of the party, becoming a stalwart of the Monday Club and an ally of the likes of Julian Amery and Ronald Bell. He served on various backbench committees, becoming a member of the executive of the 1922 Committee and vice-chairman of the Conservative backbench Foreign Affairs Committee. At the 1964 Conservative Party Conference, he was cheered to the rafters by conference delegates for a speech deeply critical of the party leadership; he was never invited to speak again. He could be an effective Commons performer. His self-confident, upper-class drawl and theatrical oratorical style enraged Labour MPs. He was often embroiled in controversy concerning Communist infiltration. In 1977 he alleged that five prominent trades union officials were agents for communist countries, based on tape recordings made by the Czech defector Josef Frolík. The following year, before Margaret Thatcher came into office, Hastings and Brian Crozier wrote her a paper setting out "the diabolical nature of the Communist conspiracy" against Britain. At Hastings's suggestion she appointed a committee comprising Willie Whitelaw, Lord Carrington, Sir Keith Joseph and Hastings himself. This proposed forming a counter-subversion executive but the scheme was quietly dropped after the Tories came to power in 1979. In 1986 Hastings successfully sued The Observer newspaper for libel following allegations that he had been one of