Page 216 - They Also Served

Lord Carrington served as a junior minister in Winston Churchill’s post-war government and as parliamentary secretary to the minister of defence in Anthony Eden’s government from 1954 to 1956. From 1956 to 1959, he was High Commissioner to Australia. Returning to government as first lord of the admiralty in the Macmillan government, he was leader of the House of Lords under the Douglas-Home Conservative regime. During Harold Wilson’s Labour government, he was leader of the opposition in the Lords before becoming defence minister under Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974. Returning to leader of the opposition in the Lords for five years, he was made foreign secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s first government. The ‘Iron Lady’ said of him, ‘Peter had great panache – we had disagreements, but there were never any hard feelings’.
Lord Carrington brokered the Lancaster House Agreement ending the Rhodesian Bush War but resigned in 1982 after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Taking full responsibility for the failure of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to predict this event, his honourable resignation was, and still is, a rarity in politics. From 1984 to 1988, he served as secretary-general of NATO and, in 1991, presided over diplomatic talks attempting to prevent civil war over the break-up of Yugoslavia. In addition to his political appointments, he was chairman of Christie’s Auction House, chancellor of the University of Reading and a director of Schweppes, Barclays Bank and the Daily Telegraph. In 1999, after the abolition of the automatic right of hereditary peers to sit in the House of Lords, he was created a life peer. The longest-serving and oldest member of the upper house, Lord Carrington died in 2018.
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