Lord Harlech: Colourful but troubled peer who struggled to overcome money problems and family tragedies

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice

A family legacy of sorrow and ill-luck clouded the life of Francis Ormsby-Gore, the sixth Baron Harlech, who died at his home in north Wales at the early age of 61. The grandson of a Cabinet Minister and son of a British ambassador to the United States, he had been born into expectations of prosperity, influence, and success.

There would indeed be for him, from his first years, a frosting of glamour, emanating from his connections both with the family of US President John F Kennedy, and with celebrities, most notably in the milieu of high fashion in 1960s London. But he also suffered the untimely losses of both his parents and two of his siblings, and their deaths, together with decades of financial difficulties imposed on him because of huge inheritance tax liabilities when he succeeded to the title in 1985, wore down his every attempt to find happiness, fulfil his duty as a peer and make ends meet. Running his estates successfully seemed, by the end, to have become a hope that eluded him, and it emerged in 2011 that he had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

His plans to make a go of business had included being a sheep farmer, running a haulage company, founding a health spa, and pursuing a proposal to turn his land over to the staging of simulated battles to enhance the abilities of commercial managers. Having inherited estates in Wales and Shropshire worth £2.6m, and been obliged to pay £1.6m in tax, by the year 2000 he was forced to sell his ancestral seat, Brogyntyn Hall in Oswestry, Shropshire. It had been in the family for two centuries, including a period of notoriety during the "Swinging Sixties" when he, his older brother and their three sisters had set up a commune in the 200-acre park.

In 1986 married Amanda Grieve, a journalist who as Amanda Harlech would become a prominent figure in the fashion industry, associated first with John Galliano and later with Karl Lagerfeld. They had a son, Jasset, and a daughter, Tallulah, but divorced in 1998.

"He was always wearing a black hat and dressed very differently to everyone else in the village so you always noticed him straight away," a neighbour of his Welsh estate at Talsarnau, Gwynedd, remembered. He was described as "a popular and colourful figure".

Lord Harlech took his obligations as a hereditary member of the House of Lords seriously, sitting as a Conservative, but here too, misfortune stalked him. Criticism rained on his head after he travelled to Bosnia as part of the All-Party British-Yugoslav Parliamentary Group, and met the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, both of whom would later be arrested and charged with war crimes. His conscientiousness was such that he began an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to have Harlech, close to his home in north Wales, twinned with the disputed Balkan territory of Kosovo. "It was a shame as I know he was very passionate about it," a friend said.

He also spoke in the Lords; one such occasion was a debate on 10 January 1996 on complementary medicine, in which he said: "Medicine can come from both music and dance just as surely as from a bottle. I should rather not use the term 'non-conventional medical treatment', since, in my view, it implies that the so-called modern medical system of healthcare and treatment is the only approach... The advances in medical science can work in tandem with traditional and indeed ancient forms of care."

An acquaintance noted, "He was a very knowledgeable person, and very friendly."

The peer, whose death was attributed to natural causes, was the son of David Ormsby-Gore, Conservative MP for Oswestry from 1950 until 1961, and Ambassador in Washington from 1961 until 1965; his grandfather was William Ormsby-Gore, who held the post of First Commissioner of Works, then became Secretary of State for the Colonies in Stanley Baldwin's Cabinet of the late 1930s.

As a boy of five or six, Francis – known as "Frank", the youngest of the Ormsby-Gore children, experienced the warm greetings of the future US President John F Kennedy and his glamorous wife Jackie when they paid a private visit to Brogyntyn Hall and Oswestry in the late 1950s. His father, who became the fifth Lord Harlech in 1964, had known Kennedy since they were teenagers, after Kennedy came to London intending to study in 1935. Francis's siblings were Julian, 13 years older; and three sisters, Jane, Victoria and Alice, older by 12, eight and three years respectively.

Francis was 12 when tragedy struck. His mother, Sylvia, died in a car crash in 1967. He was educated at Worth, the Catholic school in West Sussex, then took part in London's 1960s flowering, by way of the siblings' association with the fashionable model agency English Boys and the boutique in King's Road, Chelsea called Hung on You. But he later suffered another blow: his brother Julian slipped into depression and was found dead in 1974 at 33, having, it was concluded, shot himself.

Meanwhile, in 1968 his sister Alice had fallen in love with, and expected to marry, the guitarist Eric Clapton. But after the five-year affair ended she sank into drug addiction and poverty; she would die of a heroin overdose shortly before her 43rd birthday in 1995.

After these blows came further disaster, another car crash, in 1985, which killed his father. The mantle of responsibility that had threatened to descend on his shoulders ever since his brother's suicide had made him the heir to the barony, now fell, and the Harlech title was his.

The hopeful refuge he took almost immediately in devoting himself to marriage and family life was to endure only a year before fate delivered a new and unmerited blow against his willingness to serve in the House of Lords: in 1999 the Blair government removed the right of all but a few hereditary peers to sit there, sending him back for good to his rural acres. He is survived by his former wife, their son and daughter, and two of his sisters. The barony now goes to his son Jasset.

Francis David Ormsby-Gore, 6th Baron Harlech: born Shropshire 13 March 1954; married 1986 Amanda Grieve (one son, one daughter); died, Gwynnedd, Wales 1 February 2016