Basil Brooke, 1st Viscount Brookeborough

Common card · No. 437707

Basil Stanlake Brooke, 1st Viscount Brookeborough (9 June 1888 – 18 August 1973), styled Sir Basil Brooke, 5th Baronet, between 1907 and 1952, and commonly referred to as Lord Brookeborough, was an Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) politician who served as the third Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from May 1943, until March 1963. Lord Brookeborough had previously held several ministerial positions in the Government of Northern Ireland, and has been described as "perhaps the last Unionist leader to command respect, loyalty and affection across the social and political spectrum". Equally well, he has also been described as one of the most hard-line anti-Catholic leaders of the UUP, and his legacy involves founding his own paramilitary group, which fed in to the reactivation of the Ulster Volunteers (UVF). It has also been said that his "amateurish governance visibly failed to address the province's economic problems" and that his prejudiced pronouncements, notably his 1933 calls for exclusive...

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