Political career
From 1930 to 1931, Nicolson edited the "Londoner's Diary" gossip column for the London evening paper, the Evening Standard, but disliked writing about high-society gossip and quit within a year.
In 1931, he joined Sir Oswald Mosley and his recently formed New Party. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for the Combined English Universities in the general election that year and edited the party newspaper, Action. After Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists the following year, Nicolson ceased to support him.
Nicolson entered the House of Commons as National Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Leicester West in the 1935 election. In the latter half of the 1930s, he was one of the relatively few MPs to alert the country to the threat of fascism. More a follower of Anthony Eden in that regard than of Winston Churchill, Nicolson was still a friend of Churchill but not an intimate one. Nicolson often supported Churchill's efforts in the Commons to stiffen British resolve and support rearmament.
A Francophile, Nicolson was a close friend of Charles Corbin, the Anglophile and anti-appeasement French ambassador to the Court of St James's.
In September 1938 when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich with his and Hitler's signature on their "peace" agreement most of the MPs in the house rose in "tumultuous acclamation", a few like Nicolson remained seated; the Tory MP Walter Liddall hissed at him "Stand up, you brute". Other MPs to remain seated were Winston Churchill (who initially rose to catch the Speaker's eye to speak), Leo Amery, Vyvyan Adams, Anthony Eden (who walked out "pale with shame and anger").
In October 1938, Nicolson spoke out against the Munich Agreement in the House of Commons: "I know that those of us who believe in the traditions of our policy, who believe that one great function of this country is to maintain moral standards in Europe, not to make friends with people whose conduct is demonstrably evil, but to set up some sort of standard by which smaller powers can test what is good in international conduct and what is not-I know that those who hold such beliefs are accused of possessing the Foreign Office mind. I thank God that I possess a Foreign Office mind".
In June 1940, Nicolson met the French writer André Maurois at the time when France was on the verge of defeat, which led Nicolson to write in his diary: "June 12, 1940. I saw André Maurois in the morning. He left Paris yesterday. He said that never before in his life had he experienced such agony as he did when he saw Paris basking under a lovely summer day and realised that he might never see it again. I do feel so deeply for the French. Paris is to them what our countryside is to us. If we were to feel the lanes of Devonshire, the rocks of Cornwall and our own unflaunting England were all concentrated in one spot and likely to be wiped out, we would feel all the pain in the world".
He became Parliamentary Secretary and official Censor at the Ministry of Information in Churchill's 1940 wartime government of national unity, serving under Cabinet member Duff Cooper for approximately a year until he was asked by Churchill to leave his position in order to make way for Ernest Thurtle MP as the Labour Party demanded more of their MPs in the Government; thereafter he was a well-respected backbencher, especially on foreign policy issues, given his early and prominent diplomatic career. From 1941 to 1946 he was also on the Board of Governors of the BBC.
In 1944, during the Battle of Monte Cassino, it was widely (but wrongly) believed that the Germans were using the abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy as an observation post to direct fire down at the Allied forces in the valley below: many demanded for the abbey to be bombed to save the lives of the Allied soldiers that were attempting to advance up the valley to take the heights of Monte Cassino, which was a key point in the Gustav line. In February 1944, Nicolson caused controversy with a column in The Spectator by saying that art was irreplaceable, but human life was expendable. He opposed the bombing of Monte Cassino abbey and said that it was a great work of art that itself contained many works of art that could never be replaced even if that meant the death of his own son, Nigel Nicolson, who was serving in the Eighth Army as it was fighting the Battle of Monte Cassino, and that it was morally better to take thousands of dead and wounded than to destroy the abbey of Monte Cassino. Much to Nicolson's chagrin, the abbey was destroyed by an American bombing raid on 15 February 1944.
When Nicolson, a Francophile, visited France in March 1945 for the first time in five years, upon landing in France he kissed the earth. When a Frenchman asked the prostrate Nicolson "Monsieur a laissé tomber quelque-chose?" ("Sir, have you dropped something?"), Nicolson replied, "Non, j'ai retrouvé quelque-chose" ("No, I have recovered something"). The exchange is little known in Britain but is well remembered in France.
After losing his seat in the 1945 general election, he joined the Labour Party, much to the dismay of his family, in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a hereditary peerage from Clement Attlee; Nicolson stood in the 1948 Croydon North by-election but lost once again.
In 1960, at the Paris summit, Nicolson wrote about the behaviour of the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev implying that he was "a little mad" and the "exchange of insults is not the best method of conducting relations between sovereign states".
