Victoria RI, published in the autumn of 1964, three years after Frank succeeded to his brother’s earldom, fulfilled the now Elizabeth Longford’s ambition of writing a book about “a historical woman”. In November 1943, Elizabeth’s sixth child, Michael, was born she had, she confessed, “an addiction to motherhood” which triumphed over her other passion, Labour politics, and when the party tried to issue an edict against further fertility she resigned as prospective Labour candidate for King’s Norton in January 1944. When Philip Toynbee tried to persuade Frank to join the Communist Party, he replied: “Elizabeth decides my party allegiance.” He did not, however, consult Elizabeth before converting to Catholicism in January 1940. She nursed the Birmingham constituency of King’s Norton for Labour: many of her and Frank’s friends were of the far left. She had already given birth to two of her eight children, future writers Antonia Fraser and Thomas Pakenham, and was about to embark on a scientific sex-selection programme which ensured the birth of a second son, Paddy, in 1937. Elizabeth joined the Cowley Labour Party and unsuccessfully stood as Labour candidate for Cheltenham in 1935. The Pakenhams returned to Oxford in 1934 when Frank became a politics don at Christ Church.
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