During the 1980s and 1990s, he campaigned alongside Lord Longford to try and gain parole for the Moors Murderer Myra Hindley, claiming that she was a reformed character and no threat to society, and had therefore qualified for parole from the life sentence imposed on her in 1966 for her role with Ian Brady in the murder of three children. He continued his campaign even after Hindley admitted taking part in two more murders in 1986. In September 1990, he even claimed that her continued imprisonment was comparable to that of Nelson Mandela, who had just been released from prison in South Africa after serving 27 years of a life sentence for his part in the battle against the oppression of black people under that country's apartheid regime. Astor had also been a supporter of the campaign for Mandela's release from prison. Along with Longford, he claimed that she was being kept in prison to serve the interests of successive Home Secretaries and their governments (who had the power to decide on minimum terms for life sentence prisoners from 1983 until 2002); these politicians gradually increased Hindley's original minimum of 25 to 30 years and from 1990 to a whole life tariff. The campaign to win parole for Myra Hindley was unsuccessful, with her appeal against the whole life tariff being rejected three times by the High Court, and she remained in prison until her death in November 2002, almost a year after Astor's own death. Longford had died earlier in 2001.