John Russell immediately filed for divorce and to have the child declared a bastard. He claimed that the child could not be his because he had not had sexual intercourse with his wife since August 1920. Hastings represented Christabel Russell in the initial trial at the High Court and lost; the decision was appealed to the Court of Appeal, where he again lost. The case was then sent to the House of Lords, who by a majority of three to two (with Lord Birkenhead giving the leading judgment) overturned the previous judgments and said that John Russell's evidence as to the legitimacy of his son was inadmissible. Hastings did not represent Christabel Russell in the House of Lords case, however, because by this point he was already Attorney General. Politics Hastings first became involved in politics after the First World War, when he joined the Liberal Party to help improve social conditions for the poorer people of the United Kingdom. He was being prepared to be the Liberal candidate for Ilford in the 1918 general election but grew disheartened by the Liberal alliance with the Conservative Party, and also by the divisions in the party; as a result, he gave up the candidacy. Hastings eventually switched sides and joined the Labour Party. His conversion, especially in the light of later events, was regarded by some as suspect: his entry in the Dictionary of Labour Biography reports speculation that Hastings foresaw that Labour may come to Government and had few senior lawyers to fill the Law Officer posts. John Paton, after speaking from the same Independent Labour Party (ILP) platform as Hastings, came to the conclusion that Hastings gave political speeches using his skill as a lawyer to master a brief; on the train home, Hastings appeared not to have heard of the ILP. After an interview with Sidney and Beatrice Webb he became the Labour candidate for Wallsend in December 1920. Beatrice Webb was later to write in her diaries that Hastings was "without any sincerely held public purpose" and "an unpleasant type of clever pleader and political arriviste, who jumped into the Labour Party just before the 1922 election, when it had become clear that the Labour Party was the alternative government and it had not a single lawyer of position attached to it". However Hastings was returned for Wallsend with a majority of 2,823 in the 1922 general