Jonathan Guinness

Jonathan Bryan Guinness was born in London on 16 March 1930, the elder of the two sons of Bryan Guinness, later 2nd Baron Moyne, and his first wife, Diana Mitford. His parents divorced when he was a small child and his mother later married the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, becoming Lady Mosley. His younger brother was the conservationist Desmond Guinness, who died in 2020.

He was educated at Eton College and at the University of Oxford.

Guinness worked as a journalist before moving into merchant banking, and until his retirement he was with the firm Leopold Joseph. From 1960 to 1988 he was a non-executive director of Guinness, the brewing company set up by his family. His 1997 book Requiem for a Family Business described from the inside the corporate developments that led to the Guinness share-trading fraud.

He served on Leicestershire County Council from 1970 to 1974. As a Conservative he contested the Lincoln by-election of 1973, which was won by Dick Taverne, and the Coventry North West by-election of 1976, losing both. He joined the Conservative Monday Club in 1968, was elected its national chairman in June 1972 and was re-elected in 1973. He later chaired the club's Race Relations and Immigration Committee and was its vice-chairman until 1990. His views on immigration, Rhodesia and South Africa drew strong opposition, and in 1974 protesters prevented him from entering a meeting at Portsmouth Polytechnic.

On the death of his father in 1992 he became the 3rd Baron Moyne and took his seat in the House of Lords, where he sat until the House of Lords Act 1999 removed most hereditary peers. In the Lords he spoke in support of the Falun Gong movement after it was banned in China in 1999.

In 1997 he bought a majority voting stake in the Swedish investment company Trustor. The purchase was financed with the company's own money, and tens of millions of pounds then disappeared from its accounts. Guinness said he had been stitched up by others, and a Swedish court found him innocent of wrongdoing.

His books included The House of Mitford (1984), written with his daughter Catherine, Shoe: The Odyssey of a Sixties Survivor (1989) and Requiem for a Family Business (1997), as well as pamphlets for the Monday Club.

In 1951 Guinness married Ingrid Wyndham. They had three children, Catherine, Jasper and Valentine, and the marriage was dissolved in 1963. In 1964 he married Suzanne Lisney, with whom he had two children, Sebastian and Daphne, the fashion figure and socialite. Suzanne died in 2005. With his long-term partner Susan "Shoe" Taylor, who died in 2003, he had three further children, Diana, Aster and Thomas. He wrote about Taylor in his 1989 book Shoe. His son Jasper died in 2011.

In 2003, after the death of his mother, he and his daughter Daphne both wrote to The Daily Telegraph to defend her against criticism by the historian Andrew Roberts.

Lord Moyne died on 30 October 2026, aged 96. His death was marked by an obituary in The Times, which described him as a member of the brewing dynasty who wrote about the Mitford family, went into banking and got caught up in a fraud case. The place and cause of death had not been made public in the reports available when this page was written. The barony passes to his son, Valentine Guinness.

Guinness is remembered as a link between two of the most written-about British families of the twentieth century, the Guinnesses and the Mitfords, and as a chronicler of both. His political activity on the hard right of the Conservative Party and his role in the Trustor affair made him a contentious public figure, while his books remain sources for historians of the Mitford sisters and of the Guinness takeover battles.