He was a Conservative in politics, and a close friend of Lord Randolph Churchill;[REF] it was in a letter to FitzGibbon in 1886 that Churchill made his famous remark that to effectively oppose Gladstone's Irish Home Rule policy, "the Orange[REF] card would be the one to play" [REF].
He was a member of both the Privy Council of Ireland and from 1900 of the British Privy Council [REF].