He became deeply involved in the capital punishment debate because he was the only Tory backbencher willing to brave the wrath of his constituency by taking up the abolitionist cause; indeed, he became the abolitionists’ spokesman in Bournemouth, and consistently supported Sydney Silverman’s abolition Bill. Then his old friend Ted Heath, now Chief Whip, told Nicolson the Government wanted to introduce a substitute Bill that would introduce total abolition in two steps. Nicolson gave him his support – a mistake, as he “lost the respect of both sides”. He was unable to enjoy his victory when capital punishment was finally ended in 1969, as he had lost his seat over Suez, in what he called “the most important incident in my life”.On 8 November 1956, a vote of confidence was taken in the Government. He was re-elected in 1955 with an increased majority of 18,500 over the other two parties.His constituents applauded his marriage in 1953 to Philippa Tennyson-d’Eyncourt, though her parents did not, and, though there were three children, and Nigel’s careers in Parliament and publishing were booming, the marriage was doomed by a growing disparity of interests.

For no better reason than this, he took the Conservative whip when he was finally elected to Parliament for Bournemouth East and Christchurch in February 1952, with a majority of 14,000. He allied himself to those Tories sympathetic to the welfare state whom Winston Churchill once said to Sir Ralph Glyn were “nothing but a bunch of pink pansies” – led by R.A. Butler, Iain Macleod and Macmillan.Nigel Nicolson spoke German, French and Italian, and was a staunch European. As a member of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, which met in Strasbourg, and then at its annual reunions at K?swater, “I came to know Hugh Gaitskell, Dick Crossman, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, John Strachey and other Labour leaders, and they inclined me more to the left than Bournemouth suspected” – especially Healey, whose high spirits he found very attractive. In fact, Nicolson was probably more valuable as a writer than as an editor.

In 1973 alone, his Alex and his Portrait of a Marriage were both serialised by the Sunday Times and both headed the best-seller list for quite a time.Nicolson said he “drifted into politics”. When his father lost West Leicester in 1945, the chairman invited the son to stand for the seat, provided he dropped the National Labour label, and stood as a Conservative. The DPP decided not to prosecute, Lolita sold 100,000 copies in Britain, and Nicolson, who was only a minority shareholder in the company anyway, lost much of his influence on his partners.At Weidenfeld’s urging he worked full-time for the company from 1960 to 1963, but resigned in January 1964, remaining an outside director until the firm was sold to Anthony Cheetham in 1992. Nicolson was proud to have published Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins (1953), Saul Bellow’s Augie March (1954) and Maurice Bowra’s The Greek Experience (1957), but will be remembered by history chiefly for the huge 1959 controversy surrounding Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Nicolson had discouraged Weidenfeld from confronting the Government head-on over the question of obscenity, though he did not appreciate the bullying of the then Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, who threatened that he would see him in the dock even after the passage into law of Roy Jenkins’s liberalising Obscene Publications Bill.Nicolson wanted to prompt a test case, either by printing a single copy of the book and sending it to the authorities for a ruling or by persuading them to sue the Tunbridge Wells library for circulating the imported Olympia Press edition of Lolita. The early staff included Clarissa Churchill, Antonia Pakenham, Vanessa Jebb and Sonia Orwell – each of whom married interesting men and one of whom, as Lady Antonia Fraser, then Pinter, became a top-selling writer.Weidenfeld and Nicolson, as the firm became, was also lucky in its editors, which included the talents of Christopher Falkus, Tony Godwin and Ed Victor. Nicolson sometimes complained about his partner’s lavish and non-stop hospitality, but eventually came to see that it was sound business practice, attracting to his table not only potential authors, but investors.

After it consumed a certain amount of Nicolson’s capital, it finally died in 1950. But George Weidenfeld was a step ahead – he’d got a contract to publish illustrated children’s books (with texts mostly in the public domain) for Marks and Spencer (with whom he was connected by his first marriage to Jane Sieff).At first Nicolson knew little of publishing, but when Weidenfeld went to Israel for much of 1950 to be President Chaim Weizmann’s chef de cabinet he trusted his equally young partner to run the show. Nicolson met Weidenfeld – and the collision was wonderful.First he went to work for George Weidenfeld for £750 (almost immediately reduced to £500 “until we find our feet”) on a magazine called Contact. Though it was a magazine, with articles by Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, Ernst Gombrich, Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Bowen, Richard Crossman and Harold Macmillan, it got around paper restrictions by being bound in hard covers like a book – a formula certain to lose money. Yet he insisted that the war had little effect on my character and.