William Waldegrave, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill

Bearing the title The Honourable from birth as a younger son of an Earl, Waldegrave was the youngest (by six years) of the seven children of Geoffrey Waldegrave, 12th Earl Waldegrave, and his wife Mary Hermione Grenfell. His elder brother is the present Earl. His father's title was created five generations earlier for the diplomat and ambassador James Waldegrave, 1st Earl Waldegrave, whose grandfather was James II and VII.

Waldegrave is the nephew of the courtier Dame Frances Campbell-Preston and one of his sisters is Lady Susan Hussey, who served as a Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth II and is a Lady of the Household under King Charles III, and who became Baroness Hussey of North Bradley upon her husband's elevation to the House of Lords in 1996.

Education

Waldegrave was privately educated at Eton College, where he won the Newcastle Scholarship in 1965. He then studied at the University of Oxford where he was an undergraduate student of Corpus Christi College. During his study, he served for a term as president of the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Conservative Association. 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 subsequently, in 2001, he was appointed a Distinguished Fellow in recognition of his significant contributions in the sphere of politics and international relations.

Early career

In 1971, Waldegrave was working at the Conservative Research Department; that March 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.

Parliamentary career

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.

As junior minister

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 he became a Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1988. 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.

He is married to Caroline Burrows, 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.