Hurd was born in 1930 in the market town of Marlborough in Wiltshire. His father Anthony Hurd (later Lord Hurd) and grandfather Sir Percy Hurd were also Members of Parliament. Douglas attended Twyford School and Eton College, where he was a King’s Scholar and won the Newcastle Scholarship in 1947. He was also Captain of School (head boy).

After school Hurd did National Service, which he did not particularly enjoy, at a time when the Berlin Blockade made a Third World War seem far from unlikely. He began in July 1948 with a compulsory period in the ranks of the Royal Regiment of Artillery alongside young men of all social backgrounds. He later recorded that although living standards were no great shock after the spartan conditions at public school in those days, the petty dishonesty which he saw in the barrack room, and the waste of time which was so large a part of a conscript’s experience, made him sceptical in later years of constituents’ demands for a restoration of National Service. He was selected for officer training, attended Mons Officer Cadet School, Aldershot from November 1948, and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the 5th Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery (as it was then called) at the start of March 1949. He was released from the Army in September 1949 to take up his place at Cambridge University. He trained for a few weeks each summer as a reserve officer until 1952.

Hurd went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in the autumn of 1949. He achieved an Upper Second (II:1) in his preliminary exams in summer 1950. In March 1951 he was approached by an Admiral to be recruited to British Intelligence. He attended a selection panel, but withdrew from the process because, he later wrote, he did not want a career which would have to be pursued in secret. Hurd’s brother Julian, who was on the officer training course at Aldershot at the time, committed suicide in June 1951. In his third year, Hurd served as Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association for Michaelmas (autumn) Term 1951 and President of the Cambridge Union Society in Easter (summer) Term 1952. His special subject for study was the Second French Republic, and he graduated in 1952 with a first-class degree (BA) in history.

In 1952, Hurd joined the Diplomatic Service. He was posted to China, the United States and Italy, before leaving the service in 1966 to enter politics as a member of the Conservative Party.

Hurd has married twice. In 1960, he married his first wife Tatiana, daughter of Major Arthur Eyre MBE, and their union produced three sons. The couple separated in 1976, and divorced in 1982. Tatiana Hurd cited her husband’s career as the reason for their separation, saying, “Really, politics don’t mix with marriage”. In 1982 Hurd married Judy Smart, his former parliamentary secretary, who was 19 years his junior. They had two children, a boy and a girl. Judy Hurd died of leukaemia on 22 November 2008 in an Oxford hospital, aged 58.

Hurd became Private Secretary (a political appointment, his salary paid by the Conservative Party) to Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, and was first elected to Parliament in February 1974 to represent the constituency of Mid Oxfordshire. After his election, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the February 1974 Dissolution Honours, gazetted on 2 April 1974. At the 1983 general election the seat was replaced by Witney and he remained MP for that seat until his retirement from the House of Commons in 1997 having served 23 years in Parliament. (From 2001 to 2016 this constituency was represented by the former Leader of the Conservative Party and former British prime minister, David Cameron.)

Hurd is Chairman of the Advisory Council at FIRST, an international affairs organisation. Hurd was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974 and Companion of Honour in the 1996 New Year Honours. He was formerly a Visiting Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and Chairman of the German British Forum. On 17 July 2009, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (Hon DLitt) from Aston University at its Degree Congregation.

Hurd was appointed Minister of State at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office upon the Conservative victory in the 1979 general election and remained in that post for the duration of the Parliament. After the 1983 election Thatcher moved Hurd to the Home Office, but just over a year later he was promoted to Cabinet rank, succeeding James Prior as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In this position, his diplomatic skills paved the way for the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement on the future of Northern Ireland, which marked a turning point in British-Irish co-operation on the political situation in the troubled region. A month before the agreement was signed, however, Hurd returned to the Home Office, this time as Home Secretary, following the demotion of Leon Brittan to the Department of Trade and Industry.

In 1988, Hurd set up the charity Crime Concern. Crime Concern worked to reduce crime, anti-social behaviour and the fear of crime, by working with young people, their families and adult offenders, offering opportunities through training and employment. Crime Concern merged with young people’s charity Rainer in 2008 to become Catch22. Hurd is fluent in Mandarin, French and Italian. He is a patron of the pro EU European Movement UK.

Hurd’s Cabinet career progressed further during the turbulent final months of Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership. On 26 October 1989, Hurd moved to the Foreign Office, succeeding John Major, whose rapid rise through the Cabinet saw him become Chancellor of the Exchequer in the wake of Nigel Lawson’s resignation.

In mid-November 1990, he supported Margaret Thatcher’s candidature as Conservative Party leader against challenger Michael Heseltine, but on her withdrawal from the second round of the contest on 22 November, Hurd decided to enter the race as a moderate centre-right candidate, drawing on his reputation as a successful ‘law-and-order’ Home Secretary. He was seen as an outsider, lagging behind the more charismatic Heseltine and the eventual winner, John Major, who shared the moderate centre-right political ground with Hurd but had the added advantages of youth and political momentum. Hurd’s Etonian education may have also been a disadvantage. He came third, winning 56 of the 372 votes cast and, together with Heseltine, conceded defeat to allow Major, who had fallen just three votes short of an outright majority, to return unopposed and take over as Prime Minister on 27 November 1990. Hurd was gracious in defeat and, on the formation of Major’s first Cabinet, was returned to his position as Foreign Secretary.

Hurd was widely regarded as a statesmanlike British Foreign Secretary, his tenure having been particularly eventful. He oversaw Britain’s diplomatic responses to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as well as the first Gulf War to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Hurd cultivated good relations with the United States under President George Bush Sr., and sought a more conciliatory approach to other members of the European Community, repairing relationships damaged during the increasingly Eurosceptic tone of Margaret Thatcher’s final years. Hurd was a signatory of the Maastricht Treaty establishing the European Union in 1992. Hurd welcomed a reunified Germany into the European political community in 1990.

Hurd was involved in a public scandal concerning Britain’s funding of a hydroelectric dam on the Pergau River in Malaysia, near the Thai border. Building work began in 1991 with money from the British foreign aid budget. Concurrently, the Malaysian government bought around £1 billion’s worth of British-made arms. The suggested linkage of arms deals to aid became the subject of a UK Government inquiry from March 1994. In November 1994, after an application for Judicial Review brought by the World Development Movement, the High Court of Justice held that the British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd’s actions were ultra vires [outside his legal powers and therefore unlawful] by allocating £234 million towards the funding of the dam, on the grounds that the legislation only empowered him to fund economically sound projects.

In 1997, the administration of the UK’s aid budget was removed from the Foreign Secretary’s remit (previously the Overseas Development Administration had been under the supervision of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office). The new department, the Department for International Development (DfID), has its own Secretary of State who is a member of the Cabinet. In 1995, during the Cabinet reshuffle widely seen as setting up the Conservative team which would contest the next election, Hurd retired from frontline politics after 11 years in the Cabinet and was replaced by Malcolm Rifkind.

Hurd left the House of Commons at the 1997 general election, and on 13 June 1997 was created Baron Hurd of Westwell, of Westwell in the County of Oxfordshire, which enabled him to continue sitting in Parliament as a member of the House of Lords. He retired from the Lords on 9 June 2016.

In December 1997, Hurd was appointed Chairman of British Invisibles (now renamed International Financial Services London or IFSL). He was Chairman of the judging panel for the 1998 Booker Prize for Fiction. He became a member of the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords in February 1999, and in September 1999 he was appointed High Steward of Westminster Abbey, reflecting his long active membership of the Church of England. He later went on to chair the Hurd Commission which produced a review of the roles and functions of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Hurd’s second son, Thomas, joined the Diplomatic Service. His name appeared on a list of suspected MI6 operatives which was published on the Internet, as did Douglas himself, supposedly the work of disgruntled former SIS (MI6) or Security Service (MI5) employees. The authenticity of several entries on the list is questionable, leading to speculation that it was in fact compiled by a poorly informed amateur. The Hon Thomas was appointed OBE in 2006, and is married with five children. His wife, Catherine, known as Sian, died on 21 May 2011, after falling from the roof of the building where they lived on East 84th Street in New York City.

Hurd is a member of the Top Level Group of UK Parliamentarians for Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation, established in October 2009.

Shortly after his withdrawal from frontline politics, Hurd travelled to Serbia to meet Slobodan Milošević on behalf of the British bank NatWest (see below), fuelling some speculation that Hurd had taken a pro-Serbian line. There has been criticism of Hurd’s policies in relation to the war. The Bosnian government even threatened to charge Hurd as an accomplice to genocide before the War Tribunal at The Hague, though this came to nothing. In 2010 Hurd told a reporter that he was troubled by his Bosnia policy but still doubted that intervention would have brought about an earlier end to the war.

Hurd’s eldest son, Nick Hurd, was Conservative Member of Parliament for Ruislip Northwood and Pinner from May 2005 to December 2019. In 2010, he was appointed Minister for Civil Society and married Lady Clare Kerr, daughter of the Marquess of Lothian.