Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on 7 August 1949. He studied at Clare College, Cambridge and Yale University, then worked for the Foreign Office and Conservative Research Department before being elected Conservative MP for West Derbyshire in 1979. He left Parliament in 1986 to become a television presenter, hosting ITV's Weekend World. He became a prominent political columnist and journalist, working for The Times from 1988 onwards as a parliamentary sketch writer (until 2002) and later as a columnist. He was a co-founder of the gay rights charity Stonewall in 1989.