About

Ad and Wal

Peter Hain was born in 1950 and grew up in Pretoria.

Adelaine and Walter Hain joined the Liberal Party of South Africa when membership of it marked you out. They kept at it after the state made clear what that would cost. Adelaine was arrested and held. Walter was jailed. In 1963 she was served with a banning order and in 1964 he was, which meant they could not be politically active or be quoted. Walter was an architect and the order stopped him working, so the family lived on what he could pick up through friends who were willing to be seen with him.

John Harris was in the party with them. In 1964 he planted a bomb at Johannesburg station which killed a woman and injured many more, and he was hanged for it in April 1965. His parents were banned and could not speak in public, so the address at the funeral was read by their eldest son. Hain was 15.

The family left for London in 1966. Walter went back to architecture and Adelaine spent the next 30 years working voluntarily in the anti-apartheid struggle and in local politics. Their son told their story in 2014, in Ad & Wal.

Stopping the tours

He joined the Young Liberals in London and by 1969 was chairing the Stop The Seventy Tour committee, at 19. Demonstrators got onto the pitch at Twickenham and blocked the team coach at grounds across the country, and the Springbok rugby tour was picked apart fixture by fixture. The cricket tour arranged for the summer of 1970 never took place. His first book, Don’t Play With Apartheid, followed in 1971.

In 1972 he was convicted of conspiracy over the campaign and fined. A letter bomb was posted to the family home and failed to go off. In 1976 he stood trial for a bank robbery in Putney for which he had been framed, and was acquitted. He has written about the case twice, in Mistaken Identity and in A Putney Plot?

Labour, and Neath

The move from the Liberals to Labour came in 1977. A decade in the anti-fascist campaigns and the trade union movement followed, latterly as head of research at the Union of Communication Workers. Several books came out of those years, and a number of them argue against positions his own side had taken. Proportional Misrepresentation, from 1986, sets out the case against the electoral reform much of the left had by then adopted.

Neath elected him at a by-election in April 1991. He held the seat for 24 years.

Government

He was a minister for 12 years from 1997, seven of them in Cabinet. He began as a Welsh minister, organising the campaign to win the 1997 referendum that established a Welsh legislature, then moved to the Foreign Office with responsibility for Africa and later for Europe, and then to energy at the Department of Trade and Industry.

In October 2002 he was promoted to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Wales, a post he held jointly with Leader of the House of Commons from 2003 to 2005, then with Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2005 to 2007, and then with Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from 2007 to 2008. Having resigned, he was cleared of reporting donations late to his campaign to be Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and in 2009 he was reappointed Secretary of State for Wales.

Northern Ireland came in 2005, with the institutions suspended and both governments running short of options. The Northern Ireland (Offences) Bill, intended to resolve the position of those known as on-the-runs, was withdrawn later that year after Sinn Féin objected to security force members being included. Following the St Andrews Agreement of October 2006 he negotiated a power-sharing agreement between the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin which saw these bitter blood enemies share devolved government in May 2007, with Ian Paisley as First Minister and Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister.

In 2012 he left the shadow Cabinet to campaign for a barrage across the Severn estuary, on the argument that it would be the largest renewable energy project in Europe and the biggest investment Wales had seen. The government did not take it forward. He stood down from the Commons in 2015.

The Lords

Lord Hain of Neath since November 2015. Teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2017, where his father had studied, he began to understand the scale of what was being taken out of South Africa under Jacob Zuma. From that year he used parliamentary privilege to name the institutions involved: HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of Baroda for moving Gupta money, and KPMG, McKinsey, SAP, Hogan Lovells and Bain for the professional services wrapped around it. He gave evidence to the state capture commission in Johannesburg in 2019, and in 2022 secured a three-year exclusion of Bain from United Kingdom public contracts. It was later lifted.

He opposed the 2023 Northern Ireland Legacy Act, which granted an amnesty opposed by all Northern Ireland victims and political parties, and told the House in February 2024 that inquests were being held back until the Act discontinued them. In July 2025 he declined to support the proscription of Palestine Action, having voted with his party on almost every other division since taking his seat.

The writing

30 books since 1971. The early ones came out of the campaigns and the arguments on the left. Later came two volumes of memoir and a life of Mandela, and in Ad & Wal a return to his parents and what their politics had cost them.

Liberation and Corruption: Why Freedom Movements Fail, published in 2025, sets out why liberation movements have so often become corrupt in government.

The recent thrillers began with a visit to a game reserve in KwaZulu-Natal in 2015 where rhinos were under armed guard around the clock. The Rhino Conspiracy followed in 2020, then The Elephant Conspiracy in 2022, The Lion Conspiracy in 2024, Fallout in 2025 and Smuggler Kingpin in 2026, some of the same characters carried through. The material overlaps his anti-apartheid campaigning, his years as an MP and the anti-corruption work. He has told the Lords that the illegal wildlife trade runs at the scale of drug and people trafficking, and that it works because officials are bribed at every stage of the chain.