Mark Field

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Mark Christopher Field (born October 6, 1964) is British Conservative Party politician and Member of Parliament to the Cities of London and Westminster.

Mark Field was born at the British Medical Hospital in Hanover, Germany, the son of a British Army officer father and German/Polish mother, was educated at the Reading School before attending St Edmund Hall, Oxford where he obtained a Master's degree in law in 1987 and was chairman of the Oxford University Conservative Association 1985-6. He finished his education at The College of Law in Chester where he qualified as a solicitor in 1988.

In 1984 he became a personal assistant to the MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, John Patten, before working as a solicitor with Freshfields in 1990. He has been a director of his own employment agency, Kellyfield Consulting, since 1993.

He became the vice chairman of the Islington North Conservative Association for two years from 1989, and was elected as a councillor in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in 1994 before standing down after his election to Westminster in 2002. He contested the Conservative held seat of Enfield North at the 1997 general election following the retirement of the sitting MP Tim Eggar. However, 1997 was not a good year for the British Conservatives and he was defeated at the election by Labour's Joan Ryan by some 6,822 votes.

He was selected to contest the safe Conservative seat of the Cities of London and Westminster following the retirement of the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Brooke at the 2001 general election. Field was successful at the election and won the seat with a majority of 4,499 and has remained the MP there since. He made his maiden speech on June 27, 2001, in which he announced his great political hero was the former prime minister Andrew Bonar Law.[1]

In parliament, Mark Field was a member of the Lord Chancellor's Department and the renamed Constitutional Affairs Select Committee for a year from 2003. He was made an Opposition Whip by Michael Howard in 2003, becoming a spokesman on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2004. He became a spokesman on Culture, Media and Sport under the new leadership of David Cameron in 2005.

He is opposed to the scheme of congestion charging introduced by the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone.

He has been married to Michéle Acton - a former director of Hong Kong Shanghai Investment Bank and currently Executive Officer for the University College Hospital London- since 1994, however as the result of his relationship with, Elizabeth Truss, another member of the Conservative Party they have divorced in 2006. The marital home in Elizabeth Street, Belgravia has been sold.

He takes an interest in parkinson's disease, and has been a keen supporter of Bury F.C. since boyhood.

His constituency takes in most of the famous sites of London and is very much the heart of the country, the seat includes St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, as well as Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament.