He was the youngest son of the 17th Earl of Moray. In direct descent from Scotland’s King James V. An Old Etonian who had had a distinguished Great War and the first love of a woman who would die, eight decades later, as a national treasure.
James Stuart, from 1923 the nonchalant Unionist MP for Moray and Nairn, was a Scottish grandee. A lover of gossip. He was forthright, a bit of a cad — once cited as co-respondent in a divorce case — and the shrewdest judge of character.