 In June 1936 he was elected to serve on the Liberal Party Council.He spent several years in the late 1930s writing an enormous biography of the liberal statesman Percy Molteno but, though it was completed in May 1939, the outbreak of World War II prevented its publication.After the war in 1946 Hirst published "The Repeal of the Corn Laws" in which he compared the privations of the 1940s to the "hungry forties" of the previous century.