The archetypal Labour Home Secretary remains Chuter Ede (1945-51). Of course he was actually a former Liberal, but that was back when the word had different political associations to today.
Out of curiosity: if you asked an average person back then to place the Liberals on a left-right axis, what would they say?
When Ede was a member - before the First World War - unquestionably on the left. By the time Ede was a nationally prominent Labour politician, unquestionably in the middle. The thing about British Liberalism by the Edwardian era is that it was a coalition of out groups; people who did not feel comfortable with this or that element of the social order and wished to make changes to it as a result. Ede was the son of a Nonconformist grocer (quite the Liberal-voting cliché there) and was devoted to the Unitarian Church for his entire life. One reason why Ede was the archetypal Labour Home Secretary was that he combined a hardline and authoritarian approach to his office with liberalizing instincts in the more traditional sense (e.g. abolishing penal servitude, hard-labour and corporal punishment in the Criminal Justice system) and saw absolutely no contradiction between the two.
I like the historical takes of Fuli, Filuwar, Filuward, Filuwarj, Filuwardj, Filuwor, Filuwau, Filuwaru, Filuwaúrj, Filuwaúru,
Oh, forget it.
