David Owen

Aged 38, he became the youngest Foreign Secretary since Anthony Eden in 1935.

David Anthony Llewellyn Owen, Baron Owen, (born 2 July 1938) is a British politician and physician who served as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs as a Labour Party MP under James Callaghan from 1977 to 1979, and later led the Social Democratic Party (SDP).

Owen was born in 1938 to Welsh parents in Plympton, near the city of Plymouth, in Devon, England.

He also has Swiss and Irish ancestry.

He described Plymouth as, "a Cromwellian city, surrounded by royalists."

After schooling at Mount House School, Tavistock, and Bradfield College, Berkshire, he was admitted to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1956 to read Medicine, and obtained a lower second; he was made an honorary fellow of the college in 1977.

Owen was deeply affected by the Suez crisis of 1956, when Anthony Eden's Conservative government launched a military operation to retrieve the Suez Canal after Nasser's decision to nationalise it.

At the time, aged 18, he was working in a labouring job before going to Cambridge.

Owen later told Kenneth Harris:

"[T]here was Gaitskell ... criticizing Eden, and here were these men working alongside me, who should have been his natural supporters, furious with him. The Daily Mirror backed Gaitskell, but these men were tearing up their Daily Mirrors every day. ... My working mates were solidly in favour of Eden. It was not only that they taught me how people like them think; they also opened my eyes to how I should think myself. From then on I never identified with the liberal – with a small 'l' – establishment. Through that experience I became suspicious of a kind of automatic sogginess which you come across in many aspects of British life. ... The rather defeatist, even traitorous attitude reflected in the pre-war Apostles at Cambridge. I suppose it underlay the appeasement years. Its modern equivalent is a resigned attitude to Britain's continuous post-war economic decline."

He began clinical training at St Thomas's Hospital in October 1959.

In 1960, Owen joined the Vauxhall branch of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society.

He qualified as a doctor in 1962 and began work at St Thomas's Hospital.

In 1964, he contested the Torrington seat as the Labour candidate against the Conservative Party incumbent, losing in what was a traditional Conservative-Liberal marginal.

He was neurology and psychiatric registrar at St Thomas's Hospital for two years, as assistant to Dr William Sargant, then Research Fellow on the Medical Unit doing research into Parkinsonian trauma and neuropharmacology.

He was a Member of Parliament for 26 years, from 1966 to 1992.

At the next general election in 1966, Owen returned to his home town and was elected Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for the Plymouth Sutton constituency.

Aged 27, he was one of the youngest MPs in Parliament.

From 1968 to 1970, Owen served as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Navy in Harold Wilson's first government.

After Labour's defeat in the 1970 general election, he became the party's Junior Defence Spokesman until 1972 when he resigned with Roy Jenkins over Labour's opposition to the European Community.

He first quit as Labour's spokesman on defence in 1972 in protest at the Labour leader and former Prime Minister Harold Wilson's attitude to the European Economic Community; he left the Labour Shadow cabinet over the same issue later; and over unilateral disarmament in November 1980 when Michael Foot became Labour leader.

In the February 1974 general election Owen became Labour MP for the adjacent Plymouth Devonport constituency, winning it from the Conservative incumbent Dame Joan Vickers by a slim margin (437 votes).

On Labour's return to government in March 1974, he became Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health before being promoted to Minister of State for Health in July 1974.

As Minister of State for Health he encouraged Britain to become "self-sufficient" in blood products such as Factor VIII, a recommendation also promoted by the World Health Organisation.

This was principally due to the risk of Hepatitis infection from high-risk blood donors overseas who were often paid and from "skid-row" locations.

David Owen has been outspoken that his policy of "Self-Sufficiency" was not put into place (although he was, himself, Minister of Health) and gave rise to the Tainted Blood Scandal which saw 5,000 British Haemophiliacs infected with Hepatitis C, 1,200 of those were also infected with HIV.

It was later described in the House of Lords as "the worst treatment disaster in the history of the National Health Service".

In September 1976, Owen was appointed by the new Prime Minister of five months, James Callaghan, as a Minister of State at the Foreign Office, and was consequently admitted to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom.

Five months later, however, the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Crosland, died suddenly and Owen was appointed his successor.

Owen served as British Foreign Secretary from 1977 to 1979, at the age of 38 the youngest person in over forty years to hold the post.

In 1977, Owen was condemned by Black civil rights leader Billy Strachan for refusing to prevent the hanging of two Black Bermudians in the British colony.

He managed to hold on to it in the 1979 general election, again by a narrow margin (1001 votes).

In 1981, Owen was one of the "Gang of Four" who left the Labour Party to found the Social Democratic Party.

He was the only member of the Gang of Four who did not join the Liberal Democrats, which was founded when the SDP merged with the Liberal Party.

He resigned from the Labour Party when it rejected one member, one vote in February 1981 and later as Leader of the Social Democratic Party, which he had helped to found, after the party's rank-and-file membership voted to merge with the Liberal Party.

From 1981, however, his involvement with the SDP meant he developed a large personal following in the constituency and thereafter he was re-elected as an SDP candidate with safe margins.

Owen led the Social Democratic Party from 1983 to 1987, and the continuing SDP from 1988 to 1990.

Appointed as a life peer in 1992, he sat in the House of Lords as a crossbencher until March 2014, and now sits as an "independent social democrat".

In the course of his career, Owen has held, and resigned from, a number of senior posts.

He remained as MP for Plymouth Devonport until his elevation to a peerage in 1992.