 Honorary Life President of Guildford Conservatives
Lord Howell is President of Guildford Conservative Association and a former MP for Guildford. He represented Guildford in the House of Commons from 1966 to 1997. He was made a life peer in 1997 and is Shadow Minister for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs in the House of Lords and is also Shadow Deputy Leader of the Lords.
Lord Howell is the former Secretary of State for Energy, and later for Transport in Mrs Margaret Thatcher's first Cabinet (1979-83). He was Minister of State in Northern Ireland (1972-74) and has held several other Government posts. He was Chairman of the International Energy Agency Ministerial meeting in May 1979.
From 1987-97, he was Chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and is currently the Shadow Spokesperson in the House of Lords on Foreign Affairs. He is also adviser to the Conservative Opposition leadership on European Reform.
In earlier years he worked closely with both Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher and is credited by several authorities with having invented the idea of privatisation in the late nineteen-sixties. In 2001, he was awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Emperor of Japan (Japan's highest honour for foreigners) for his work in furthering UK-Japan relations.
He is the author of several books, including the best selling The Edge of Now, published in 2000 and is writes columns for The Japan Times, the International Herald Tribune and the Wall Street Journal.
Lord Howell was born in 1936 and educated at Eton. From 1954 to 1956 he was in the Armed Forces in the 2nd Btn Coldstream Guards. He went to King's College, Cambridge and studied Economics - graduating in 1959. His first job was in HM Treasury from 1959-60, then he was a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph from 1960-64. He is married with two daughters and one son.
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