Sir Patrick Gardiner Hastings KC (17 March 1880 – 26 February 1952) was an English barrister and politician noted for his long and highly successful career as a barrister and his short stint as Attorney General. He was educated at Charterhouse School until 1896, when his family moved to continental Europe. There he learnt to shoot and ride horses, allowing him to join the Suffolk Imperial Yeomanry during the Second Boer War. After demobilisation he worked briefly as an apprentice to an engineer in Wales before moving to London to become a barrister. Hastings joined the Middle Temple as a student on 4 November 1901, and after two years of saving money for the call to the bar he qualified as a barrister on 15 June 1904.

Hastings first rose to prominence as a result of the Case of the Hooded Man in 1912, and became noted for his skill at cross-examination. After his success in Gruban v Booth in 1917, his practice steadily grew, and in 1919 he became a King's Counsel (KC). Following various successes as a KC in cases such as Sievier v Wootton and Russell v Russell, his practice was put on hold in 1922 when he was returned as the Labour Member of Parliament for Wallsend in Northumberland. Hastings was appointed Attorney General for England and Wales in 1924, by the first Labour government, and knighted. His authorisation of the prosecution of J. R. Campbell in what became known as the Campbell Case, however, led to the fall of the government after less than a year in power.

Following his resignation in 1926 to allow Margaret Bondfield to take a seat in Parliament, Hastings returned to his work as a barrister, and was even more successful than before his entry into the House of Commons. His cases included the Savidge Inquiry and the Royal Mail Case, and before his full retirement in 1948 he was one of the highest paid barristers at the English bar. As well as his legal work, Hastings also tried writing plays. Although these had a mixed reception, The River was made into a silent film in 1927 named The Notorious Lady. Following strokes in 1948 and 1949, his activities became heavily restricted, and he died at home on 26 February 1952.

Hastings was born on 17 March 1880 in London to Alfred Gardiner Hastings and Kate Comyns Carr, a pre-Raphaelite painter and the sister of J. Comyns Carr. Having been born on Saint Patrick's Day Hastings was named after the saint. His father was a solicitor with "somewhat seedy clients", and the family were repeatedly bankrupted. Despite financial difficulties, there was enough money in the family to send Hastings to a private preparatory school in 1890 and to Charterhouse School in 1894. Hastings disliked school, saying "I hated the bell which drove us up in the morning, I hated the masters; above all I hated the work, which never interested me in the slightest degree". He was bullied at both the preparatory school and at Charterhouse, and did not excel at either sports or his studies.

By 1896 the family hit another period of financial trouble, and Hastings left Charterhouse to move to continental Europe with his mother and older brother Archie until there was enough money for the family to return to London. The family initially moved to Ajaccio in Corsica, where they bought several old guns and taught Hastings and his brother how to shoot. After six months in Ajaccio the family moved again, this time to the Ardennes, where they also learnt how to fish and ride horses.

While they were in the Ardennes, Hastings and his brother were arrested and briefly held for murder. While attending a fête in a nearby village Archie got into a disagreement with the local priest, who accused him of insulting the French church after misunderstanding one of his comments. The brothers returned to see the priest the next day to demand an apology. On their way home after receiving it, they were stopped by two gendarmes who arrested them for murder, informing them that the priest had been found dead ten minutes after they left. As the gendarmes prepared to take the Hastings to the police station, two more officers turned up with a villager in handcuffs. It transpired that the priest had been having an affair with the villager's sister, and after waiting for the Hastingses to leave he had killed the priest with a brick. The brothers were quickly released.

Soon after this incident, the family moved from the Ardennes to Brussels after a message from their father that the financial problems had ended. When they reached Brussels they found that the situation had actually worsened, and the family moved between cheap hotels, each one worse than the one before. Desperate for a job, Hastings accepted an apprenticeship with an English engineer who claimed to have made a machine to extract gold in North Wales. After about a year and a half of work they discovered that there was no gold to be found in that part of Wales, and Hastings was informed that his services would no longer be needed.

Hastings left the failed mining operation in 1899, and travelled to London. Just after he arrived, the Second Boer War broke out, and the British government called for volunteers to join an expeditionary force. The only qualifications required were that the recruit could ride and shoot, and Hastings immediately applied to join the Suffolk Imperial Yeomanry. He was accepted, and after two weeks of training the regiment were given horses and boarded the S.S. Goth Castle to South Africa. The ship reached Cape Town after three weeks, and the regiment disembarked. Their horses were considered too weak to be ridden, and so they were discharged and either put down or given to other soldiers. Hastings did not enjoy his time in the army; the weather was poor, the orders given were confusing and they were provided with minimal equipment.