Letter: Lord Carrington obituary

Julia Langdon’s brilliant obituary of Lord Carrington does not include one little-known fact. He bitterly regretted not having renounced his peerage in 1963, at the same time as Lords Home and Hailsham. He believed that had he done so, he could himself have become prime minister, if not in 1963, at least on a subsequent occasion. He admitted this to me when I interviewed him in 1982, when I was writing a profile for The Economist. Unfortunately, this was off the record, but I don’t suppose he would have objected to my revealing it after his death.