Who
Peter Hain led the campaign that forced the cancellation of South Africa’s 1970 cricket tour of England. He was 19. In 1976 he stood trial for a bank robbery in Putney and was acquitted. He was MP for Neath from 1991 to 2015, a minister for 12 years, and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when devolved government returned to Stormont in 2007.
The thrillers came later. They are about poaching and smuggling in southern Africa, and he has spent the same years in the Lords naming the banks and firms that moved money out of the country under Zuma.
Record
Northern Ireland
Secretary of State from 2005 to 2007, through St Andrews and the return of devolved government.
Read →Wales
MP for Neath from 1991 to 2015, two spells as Secretary of State, through devolution and the Wales Bills.
Read →Europe
Minister for Europe from 2001, then the government’s representative at the Convention that drafted the European constitution.
Read →South Africa
Sports boycotts from 1969, then naming the banks that moved money out under Zuma.
Read →Recent writing
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On proscribing Palestine Action
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The rotten heirloom that greedy liberators embrace
On the secret funds and sanctions-busting operations run by the apartheid government, and how much of that machinery survived 1994.
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Statement on the proscription of Palestine Action
Why he would not vote for it, and what he says about Israeli security and Palestinian statehood in the same breath.