Mark Lennox-Boyd

Sir Mark Alexander Lennox-Boyd (born 4 May 1943) is a British Conservative politician and a son of the 1st Viscount Boyd of Merton.

Political career

Lennox-Boyd contested Brent South in October 1974, being defeated by Labour's Laurie Pavitt.

He was MP for Morecambe and Lonsdale from 1979 to 1983, and the (slightly renamed) Morecambe and Lunesdale from 1983 until his defeat by Labour's Geraldine Smith in 1997. He served as a government whip and a Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

In a letter to Margaret Thatcher, Lennox-Boyd, then a Foreign Office official, expressed doubts about the new racially-mixed government of Zimbabwe: "A wise European said to me in Salisbury that while a white government in Rhodesia with all its apparatus of inherited authority could continue even if unsuccessful, . . . [a] black one would not be tolerated by black people for more than a month or two unless it was successful".^[1]

After Parliament

Lennox-Boyd is a Patron of Prisoners Abroad, a charity that supports the welfare of Britons imprisoned overseas and their families.

Family

He is married to Arabella Parisi (born 1938), who is better known as Arabella Lennox-Boyd. Lady Lennox-Boyd was born in Italy, but left to settle in England where she later undertook a course in Landscape Architecture at Thames Polytechnic, which went on to become part of the University of Greenwich.

References