William Waldegrave, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill

This article is about the British politician. For other people of the same name, see William Waldegrave (disambiguation).

The Right Honourable The Lord Waldegrave of North Hill PC
Waldegrave in 1981
Chief Secretary to the Treasury
In office 5 July 1995 – 2 May 1997
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	Jonathan Aitken
Succeeded by	Alistair Darling
Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food
In office 20 July 1994 – 5 July 1995
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	Gillian Shephard
Succeeded by	Douglas Hogg
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
In office 10 April 1992 – 20 July 1994
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	The Lord Patten of Barnes
Succeeded by	David Hunt
Secretary of State for Health
In office 2 November 1990 – 10 April 1992
Prime Minister	Margaret Thatcher John Major
Preceded by	Kenneth Clarke
Succeeded by	Virginia Bottomley
Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
In office 26 July 1988 – 2 November 1990
Prime Minister	Margaret Thatcher
Preceded by	David Mellor
Succeeded by	Douglas Hogg
Minister of State for Housing
In office 13 June 1987 – 26 July 1988
Prime Minister	Margaret Thatcher
Preceded by	John Patten
Succeeded by	Malcolm Sinclair
Member of Parliament for Bristol West
In office 3 May 1979 – 1 May 1997
Preceded by	Robert Cooke
Succeeded by	Valerie Davey
Personal details
Born	William Arthur Waldegrave (1946-08-15) 15 August 1946 London, United Kingdom
Political party	Conservative
Spouse	Caroline Burrows
Children	4
Alma mater	Corpus Christi College, Oxford Harvard University

William Arthur Waldegrave, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill, PC (/ˈwɔːlɡreɪv/; 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.

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 is currently Provost of Eton College, formally taking over the position on 8 February 2009.

Early life

Waldegrave is the youngest (by six years) of the seven children of Mary Hermione Grenfell and the 12th Earl Waldegrave, and the only brother of the present Earl. One of his sisters is The Lady Susan Hussey.

Education

Chapel of Eton College

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 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. Sir Richard Scott exonerated Waldegrave of "duplicitous intent" in wrongly describing the Government's policy.

In government

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:

• He asked his listeners to imagine a room full of Conservative party workers quietly talking to one another. This represents the Higgs field in space.
• A former Conservative Prime Minister enters the room. All the workers she passes are strongly attracted to her. As she moves through the room, the cluster of admirers around her create resistance to her movement, and she becomes 'heavier'. This can be imagined as how a particle moves through the Higgs field. The field clusters around a particle, resisting its motion and giving it mass.
• If a sleazy rumour crosses the room, it creates the same sort of clustering. The workers gather together to hear the details, the cluster can move across the room as the workers pass on the details to their neighbours. This cluster is the Higgs particle or Higgs Boson.

Titles and styles

• The Hon. William Waldegrave (1946–1979)
• The Hon. William Waldegrave MP (1979–1990)
• The Rt Hon. William Waldegrave MP (1990–1997)
• The Rt Hon. William Waldegrave (1997–1999)
• The Rt Hon. The Lord Waldegrave of North Hill PC (1999–)

See also

• Waldegrave, William: A Different Kind of Weather - A Memoir, Constable (2015); ISBN 978-1-47211-975-9
• Sustrans

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by William Waldegrave
• Announcement of his introduction at the House of Lords House of Lords minutes of proceedings, 19 October 1999
• A more recent picture: http://cdn.mattchedit.com/cms/LIVE/businesslife.co/resources/rsz_lord_waldegrave__martin_hall.jpg