He'd had no choice, had he?

Yes, it is probably better. Maybe figure out an action word to use instead of had.

What choice did he have?

tko said:

Take out the contradiction, sounds pretty stupid, yet it's common vernacular, or is it?

He had had no choice had he?

There's a whole bunch of sentence that have double words like this, is it best just to rewrite them?

thanks!

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It doesn't sound any better with the contraction. It sure isn't common vernacular with people I know. That isn't just a double word, which is bad enough, but a third "had" is thrown in, and that takes it beyond the pale.

Even "he thought" is almost always unnecessary. Readers know when a characfter is thinking in narrative. But even if you do use "he thought", then what's wrong with "He thought he had no choice"? Or "He believed he had no choice"?

Not even past actions need a double "had".

Whenever I stumble across a sentence of my own where I stop and say, is this correct? I find a different way to say it. This sentence is a good example of such.

He asked himself if this had been his only choice.

Well, the pluperfect of "have a choice" is "had had a choice," just as the pluperfect of "have to go" is "had had to go" and the past tense of "had five dollars in his pocket" is "had had five dollars in his pocket."

"He hadn't had a choice" is the correct, if clunky, form.

As others have suggested, you can try to find another way to express the same concept, but if it truly has to be in the pluperfect, then you really don't have a choice sometimes: you're going to have "had had."