Harold Nicolson, diplomat, author, diarist, and politician, was born in Tehran on 21 September 1886. Following his father into the diplomatic corps, he served as a junior member of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War, and returned to Iran as Counsellor in 1925. In 1929 he resigned from the Foreign Office to pursue a career in journalism, editing the "Londoner's Diary" for Lord Beaverbrook's "Evening Standard". This proved unsuccessful, as did his subsequent political career, which saw him move from Oswald Mosley's New Party to Clement Attlee's Labour Party. Throughout, he maintained a detailed private diary. His entry for 4 April 1930, records, "Vita telephones to say she has seen the ideal house – a place in Kent, near Cranbrook, a sixteenth-century castle".