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Douglas Hurd
Douglas Hurd was born in 1930 and educated at Eton College and Cambridge University. Hurd's father and grand-father had both been MPs. After leaving university he joined the Foreign Office as a civil servant, entering Parliament as the MP for Mid Oxfordshire in 1974. He held this seat, renamed in 1983 following boundary changes as Witney, until he left Parliament in 1997.
Following the 1979 General Election, Hurd became the Minister of State at the Foreign Office and then in 1983 became a Minister of State at the Home Office. The following year he was promoted to the Cabinet as the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland but a year later in 1985 he returned to the Home Office as the Home Secretary. He held this position until being moved to the Foreign Office in 1989 by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.
Hurd maintained his Cabinet position following the election of John Major as Conservative Party leader in November 1990, and held that position until 1995. He resigned as soon as John Major announced the 1995 leadership election, citing that he had intended to resign anyway, and that by doing so now he opened up a new Cabinet position and also ensured that his resignation would not be linked with the outcome of the leadership election.
Following his departure from the House of Commons in 1997, he was elevated to the Peerage as Baron Hurd of Westwell. His son, Nick Hurd, is now also an MP, making him the fourth generation in his family to enter the House of Commons.
In his auto-biography (Douglas Hurd - The Memoirs) he wrote of John Major, "John Major was in the habit of talking, even to people he did not know well, in terms of pessimism, of self-doubt, of complaint against the malignity of his enemies, of his colleagues or of the fates in general. Some people took this as proof of his inadequacy. Rather, as I learned, it was a technique, a mechanism of management by means of overflow. I do not mean that what he confessed to me was bogus or invented. His anxieties were real, but only part of the whole. He relished the job at the same time as he complained about it. More than that, behind the parade of complaints I learned to recognise an essential integrity and confidence in his own ability to handle matters. In some Foreign Office matters where he and I worked hour by hour, side by side together, I often found him more patient and more competent than I would have been in his chair. Once or twice, for instance over intervention to help the Kurds in 1991, I found something extra - a generous imaginativeness based on firm principle - which carried him beyond my own judgement into decisions which turned out to be correct. I enjoyed John Major's company and supported what he was trying to do".