Peter Hain

His 4th great-grandfather was George Southey (1776–1831) who hailed from Devon.

Hain descends from his daughter, Sophia Stirk (née Southey), whose brother George helped to track and kill the Xhosa tribal chief Hintsa kaKhawuta (ca. 1790 – 1835).

A brother of Sophia and George Southey was Sir Richard Southey, a British colonial administrator, cabinet minister and landowner in South Africa.

When Hain was 10, he was awoken in the early hours by police officers searching his bedroom for 'incriminating documents'.

Aged 11 he was again awoken to be told his parents had been imprisoned for leafleting in support of Nelson Mandela's campaign; they were released without charge after fourteen days' detention.

At 15, Hain spoke at the funeral of John Frederick Harris, an anti-apartheid activist who was hanged for murder for the bombing of the Johannesburg main railway station, injuring 23 people and killing one.

Hain and his parents strongly opposed the bombing but stood by Harris and his wife Ann and baby son David, who were family friends.

Hain's maternal grandparents were of 1820 Settler British South African stock.

Hain's paternal grandparents, civil engineer Walter Vannet Hain of Dundee, and Mary Hain née Gavin of Glasgow, married in 1919, leaving Shettleston, Lanarkshire, on 17 September 1920 on the Edinburgh Castle with their newborn baby William Ayers Vannet Hain, sailing from Southampton to South Africa.

Hain's father, later to become an architect, was born there on 29 December 1924.

Peter Gerald Hain, Baron Hain (born 16 February 1950), is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2005 to 2007, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from 2007 to 2008 and twice as Secretary of State for Wales from 2002 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2010.

As a result of security police harassment, Hain's father was unable to continue his work as an architect, and the family, deprived of an income, was forced to leave for the United Kingdom in 1966.

Having joined the British Anti-Apartheid Movement at aged 17 in 1967, when Hain was 19 he became chairman of the Stop The '70 Tour campaign which disrupted tours by the South African rugby union and cricket teams in 1969 and 1970.

In 1968, he joined the Liberal Party and was elected chairperson in 1971 and then in 1975 president of the Young Liberals, but in 1977 switched to Labour.

The same year, he was a founder of the Anti-Nazi League.

Born in Kenya Colony to South African parents, Hain came to the United Kingdom from South Africa as a teenager and was a noted anti-fascist and anti-apartheid campaigner in the 1970s, and was convicted of criminal conspiracy for leading direct action events.

In the 1970s, Hain was also Honorary Vice-president of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality when he clashed with lobbying interests from the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE).

In 1971 director John Goldschmidt produced a film for Granada's World in Action programme featuring Hain debating "Apartheid in South Africa" at the Oxford Union.

The film was transmitted on the ITV network.

In 1972 a private prosecution resulted in his conviction for criminal conspiracy at the Old Bailey for which he was fined £200.

The prosecution was funded largely from apartheid-supporting whites in South Africa due to his campaign against white-only South African sports tours.

In 1972, the South African Security Services were suspected of sending him a letter bomb that failed to explode because of faulty wiring.

Hain was educated in South Africa at Hatfield Primary School and Pretoria Boys High School and in London at Emanuel School, a state school, later becoming a private fee-paying institution, then Queen Mary College, University of London, graduating with a first class bachelor's degree in Economics and Political science in 1973, and the University of Sussex, obtaining an MPhil.

He was acquitted of three other conspiracy counts after defending himself in the four week trial described in the book edited by Derek Humphry, Cricket Conspiracy (1975, ISBN 0-901108-40-5).

After university, Hain worked as a researcher for the Union of Communication Workers from September 1976, later rising to become their head of research.

During this time, Hain wrote several articles that harshly criticised Israel, including a 1976 piece in The Guardian newspaper where he stated that Israel needed to be dismantled to make way for a secular, democratic Palestinian state.

In 1976 Hain was tried for, and acquitted of, a 1975 bank theft, having been framed by the South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS) according to his 1987 book, A Putney Plot.

He contested Putney in the 1983 and 1987 general elections but was defeated on both occasions by Conservative David Mellor.

A member of the Labour Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for Neath between 1991 and 2015.

Elected to Parliament at a 1991 by-election, he initially served in Tony Blair's government as a junior minister in the Wales Office, Foreign Office and Department of Trade and Industry.

Having already been selected as Labour's candidate for the Neath constituency at the 1992 general election, Hain was elected to the House of Commons at the by-election in April 1991 that followed the death of the sitting member, Donald Coleman, who had announced his intention to retire at the next election.

Promoted to the Cabinet as Welsh Secretary in 2002, he served concurrently as Leader of the House of Commons from 2003 to 2005 and Northern Ireland Secretary from 2005 to 2007.

Hain ran for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in the 2007 deputy leadership election, coming fifth out of six candidates.

He was promoted to Work and Pensions Secretary by new leader Gordon Brown, while remaining Welsh Secretary.

His failure to declare donations during the deputy leadership contest led to his resignation from both roles in 2008.

He later returned to the Cabinet from 2009 to 2010 as Welsh Secretary.

After Labour was defeated at the 2010 general election, Hain was Shadow Welsh Secretary in the Shadow Cabinet of Ed Miliband from 2010 until 2012, when he announced his retirement from frontline politics.

He announced in June 2014 he would stand down as MP for Neath at the 2015 general election and was subsequently nominated for a life peerage in the 2015 Dissolution Honours.

Whilst his father was working temporarily there, Hain was born in Nairobi in what was then Kenya Colony, but he moved to the Union of South Africa when his parents returned about a year later.

His South African parents, Walter Vannet Hain and Adelaine Hain (née Stocks), were anti-apartheid activists in the Liberal Party of South Africa, for which they were made "banned persons", briefly imprisoned, and prevented from working.