William Waldegrave, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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–)