On 11 July 2002, Cherie Booth QC, the distinguished human rights lawyer,  gave the inaugural Longford Lecture at Church House, Westminster.

Introduction by Jon Snow

How best to remember Frank Longford?  It is a challenge.  Do we attend to his life as a Catholic, or as a socialist; a father, grandfather, or friend, or as a writer?  Or do we light upon his extraordinary longevity in politics - from unsuccessfully contesting Oxford in 1945, to serving as Minister for Germany under Attlee; from resigning on high principle from the Wilson cabinet in 1968, to actively debating with the Blair government in 2001, his 96th year?

In the end, the trustees of the Longford Trust decided to establish a lecture in his memory that would touch upon all of the above, and more.

I first met Frank in 1970.  He was actively running the New Horizon Youth Centre and was looking for a director.  He gave me the job.  For the next 31 years we lunched more or less once a month.  New Horizon was the product of Frank's resignation from the Cabinet over the then Government's failure to raise the school leaving age to sixteen.

Frank was an extraordinary collector of people.  From the last head of BOAC, Sir Matthew Slattery, to the man who inspired Toynbee Hall, John Profumo.  Then of course there were the prisoners. Every week, right up to the months before he died, Frank would make his way by public transport across Britain, from Parkhurst or Dartmoor to Durham or Rampton.  Above and beyond all other causes, Frank saw the way society treated its prisoners as the litmus test of a caring and compassionate society.  It constantly got him into trouble.  But throughout his life, he could be relied upon, with vivid working experience, to question the Government of the day on those issues and support people who would otherwise never attract national interest.

We were never in any doubt that Cherie Booth would be the best possible inaugural Longford lecturer.  But given the tabloid press's determination to hound her on every cause, would she do it?

From the very outset, she was determined that she would.  Her working knowledge of the evolving consequences of the Human Rights Act, her own Catholicism, and her knowledge of prisoners' rights made her a superbly qualified speaker.  She did not disappoint.  How Frank would have loved it - the wife of the Prime Minister of the day, a QC in her own considerable right, speaking so eloquently in his memory.  And Elizabeth Longford, for 70 years his spouse, loved it all too.  Frail though she was, she made it to the ceremony and thanked Cherie in person.

Church House in Westminster was packed - much of the hugely extended Pakenham family was present - as were the directors of New Horizon, the Prison Reform Trust and New Bridge, a project for prisoners leaving jail.  There were many, many others from every walk of Frank's life - ministers, clerics, ex-prisoners, academics, friends and admirers.

Cherie Booth has given the Longford Lectures a wonderful start. We hope that we shall be able to follow her annually with the innovative and the inventive in social and community action.  Our aspiration is to highlight and reward the best in those fields where Frank Longford himself achieved so much.

The Law, the Victims and the Vulnerable

Cherie Booth QC 

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