text: After playing a marginal role in the resignation of Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940, he failed to win any favour from the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill (his second cousin), who thought little of his talents. With talk of his possible internment, Londonderry retreated to Mount Stewart, where he produced Wings of Destiny (1943), a relatively short memoir that was considerably censured by some of his former colleagues, and where he died in 1949.
  On the mantlepiece of his smoking room at Mount Stewart, Londonderry retained a memento of his diplomatic démarche: an Allach porcelain figurine of an SS Fahnenträger (SS flag bearer). The gift from Reichmarshall Hermann Göring was neither destroyed nor removed at the outbreak of war.
  Lord Londonderry served as Lord Lieutenant of County Down between 1915 and 1949 and of County Durham between 1928 and 1949 and was Chancellor of the University of Durham and The Queen's University of Belfast.  He was Mayor of Durham during the year of George VI's Coronation (1937).  He was sworn of the Irish Privy Council in 1918, of the Privy Council of Northern Ireland in 1921 and of the Imperial Privy Council in 1925 and appointed a Knight Companion of the Garter in 1919.