Peter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington

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Peter Alexander Rupert Carington, 6th Baron Carrington, KG, GCMG, CH, MC, PC,DL (born 6 June 1919) is a British Conservative politician and served as British Foreign Secretary between 1979 and 1982 and as Secretary-General of NATO from 1984 to 1988.

Carington was educated at Eton and RMA Sandhurst. In 1938 he succeeded his father as 6th Baron Carrington and took his seat in the House of Lords on his 21st birthday in 1940. During the Second World War he served as a major in the Grenadier Guards and was awarded the Military Cross.

Image:Plaque stonework ainslie church ACT.jpg After the war Lord Carrington became involved in politics and served in the Conservative administrations of Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry for Agriculture and Food from November 1951 to October 1954 and to the Ministry of Defence from October 1954 to October 1956. The latter year Carrington was appointed High Commissioner to Australia, a post he held until October 1959.

After his return to Britain he served under Harold Macmillan as First Lord of the Admiralty until October 1963 and was then Minister without Portfolio and Leader of the House of Lords under Sir Alec Douglas-Home until October 1964, when the Conservatives fell from power. From 1964 to 1970 he was Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords. When the Conservatives returned to power in 1970 under Ted Heath, Carrington became Defence Secretary, which he remained until 1974. He also served as Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1972 to 1974, and was briefly Secretary of State for Energy from January to March 1974.

Lord Carrington was again Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords from 1974 to 1979. In 1979 he was made Foreign Secretary and Minister for Overseas Development as part of the first Cabinet of Margaret Thatcher. He chaired the Lancaster House conference in 1979, a wrapup of Zimbabwe's revolutionary war attended by Ian Smith, Abel Muzorewa, Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, Herbert Chitepo, Josiah Tongogara that paved the way for second elections in February, 1980. He was Foreign Secretary in 1982 when the Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentina. Showing great moral courage, he took full responsibility for the complacency and failures in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to foresee this development and resigned. Lord Carrington then served as Secretary-General of NATO from 1984 to 1988.

Apart from his political posts he is the Chancellor of the University of Reading and has served as chairman of several companies, including Christie's, and as a director of many others, including Barclays Bank, Schweppes and the Daily Telegraph. There is also significant evidencethat he served as Chairman of the secretive Bilderberg group for most of the 1990s, succeeded in 1999 by Étienne Davignon.

After the House of Lords Act 1999 removed the automatic right of hereditary peers to sit in the House of Lords, Carrington (along with all former Leaders of the House of Lords) was given a life peerage as Baron Carington of Upton, of Upton in the County of Nottinghamshire, and therefore still sits in the House of Lords. He is currently the second-longest serving member of the House of Lords after George Jellicoe, 2nd Earl Jellicoe. It might be noted that his family surname (which the family assumed in 1839 in lieu of Smith) and life peerage are both spelt Carington (single "r"), whilst the hereditary peerages are spelt Baron Carrington (double "r").

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