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Iain Duncan Smith 1975.
The son of a highly decorated World War Two fighter pilot, George Iain Duncan Smith was born in Edinburgh on 9th April 1954. Educated at HMS Conway, a merchant navy training school in Anglesey, he spent a year studying in Italy before entering Sandhurst. Commissioned in 1975 into The Scots Guards, he served in Northern Ireland then was ADC to Major-General Sir John Acland, head of the Commonwealth Ceasefire Monitoring Force at the end of the civil war in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.
Relinquishing his commission in 1981, he worked for GEC-Marconi before joining the Conservative Party. In 1987, he unsuccessfully fought the seat of Bradford West before being selected to fight the safe seat of Chingford following the retirement of Sir Norman Tebbit in 1992. After five years on the back benches, he was made shadow secretary of state for social security and, in 1999, shadow defence secretary. After the Labour victory in the 2001 election, the Conservative leader William Hague resigned, and Duncan Smith won the subsequent leadership contest. Initially considered an outsider, his campaign surged after Margaret Thatcher gave him her support.
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