Spouse Caroline Waldegrave Role Politician | Name William Baron | |
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Previous office Secretary of State for Health (1990–1992) Books A Different Kind Of Weather: A Memoir Similar People John Major, Tony Little, Henry VI of England, Elizabeth II | ||
William Arthur Waldegrave, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill, PC (; born 15 August 1946) is a British Conservative politician who served in the Cabinet from 1990 until 1997 and is a life member of the Tory Reform Group. He is now a life peer and Provost of Eton College.
Contents
- Early life
- Education
- Early career
- Member of Parliament
- As a Cabinet Minister
- Personal life
- Titles and styles
- References
Waldegrave's 2015 memoir, A Different Kind of Weather, discusses his high youthful political ambition, his political and to some extent personal life, and growing acceptance that he would not achieve his ultimate ambition. It also provides an account of the Heath, Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Major Governments, including his role in development of the community charge or poll tax – in fact it includes a chapter entitled 'The Poll Tax – all my own work'.
Waldegrave served as a Trustee (1992-2011) and Chair (2002–2011) of the Rhodes Trust, during which time he also helped to create and served as a Trustee of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation. His portrait hangs at Rhodes House, Oxford.
Waldegrave was the Chairman of Trustees for the National Museum of Science and Industry from 2002 to 2010. He became Provost of Eton College, on 8 February 2009.
Early life
Born Hon. as the son of an Earl, William Waldegrave was the youngest (by six years) of seven children of Mary Hermione Grenfell and the 12th Earl, his elder brother being the present Earl. One of his sisters is The Lady Susan Hussey, elevated to the House of Lords in her own right. His father's title was created five generations earlier for diplomat and ambassador James Waldegrave, 1st Earl Waldegrave, whose grandfather was James II and VII.
Education
Waldegrave was educated at Eton College, where he won the Newcastle Scholarship in 1965, and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he served for a term as president of the Oxford Union. Oxford was followed by Harvard University in the United States, on a Kennedy Scholarship. In 1971 he was elected a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and is now a Distinguished Fellow.
Early career
In 1971 Waldegrave was working at the Conservative Research Department and in March 1971 he was appointed to the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS, also referred to as the Think Tank). “He was from the beginning one of the most active 'philosophers' of the CPRS, and the proponent of strong views about its proper roles and functions.”. He was one of the few openly political members of the staff and was used by Victor Rothschild, head of the CPRS, as a link with both the Conservative party (then in government) and the outside, non Civil Service world. He left in December 1973.
Member of Parliament
He was elected to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament (MP) for Bristol West in 1979. He was regarded as a member of the "wet" or moderate tendency of the Conservative Party, and despite this progressed well from the backbenches in Margaret Thatcher's government: He became a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Education and Science in 1981 before moving to the Department of the Environment in 1983. He remained at Environment, becoming a Minister of State in 1985, until 1988 when he became a Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In this post he was involved in setting policy on arms exports to Iraq; the initial draft of the Scott Report found that he had agreed in February 1989 to relax the policy, but had sent out 38 untrue letters to Members of Parliament stating that the policy was unchanged. However Sir Richard Scott exonerated Waldegrave of "duplicitous intent" in wrongly describing the Government's policy.
As a Cabinet Minister
He was promoted to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Health in November 1990, just days before Thatcher's resignation, and remained a member of the Cabinet throughout John Major's time as Prime Minister. He became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Cabinet Office with responsibility for public services and science in 1992, Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in 1994 and Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1995.
He attended Bilderberg meetings three times.
After losing his Commons seat to Valerie Davey in Labour's 1997 landslide, he entered the House of Lords as Baron Waldegrave of North Hill, of Chewton Mendip in the County of Somerset, in 1999.
Personal life
He is married to Caroline Waldegrave, cookery writer and managing director of Leith's School of Food and Wine. They have four children, Katherine, Elizabeth, James and Harriet.
Waldegrave is a trustee of Cumberland Lodge, an educational charity. He is an active member of the Board of Managers for the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
He is notable for having offered a prize for the best lay explanation of the Higgs Boson. In 1993, when he was the British science minister he observed that British taxpayers were paying a lot of money (in contributions to CERN) for something very few of them understood, and he challenged UK particle physicists to explain, in a simple manner on one piece of paper, 'What is the Higgs Boson, and why do we want to find it?'
Professor David Miller's metaphor is probably the most quoted explanation of the Higgs Boson and won the prize: