Matthew Parris

Born 7th August 1949 in Johannesburg, Matthew Parris was educated in Britain and Africa, graduating from Clare College, Cambridge, and going on to study International Relations at Yale.

Two years at the Foreign Office were followed by a spell at the Conservative Research Department. From 1977 until the 1979 General Election, he was on the staff of Mrs. Thatcher’s office.

Elected Member of Parliament for West Derbyshire in 1979, he gave up his seat in 1986 to become Presenter of L.W.T’s “Weekend World”, a political interview programme, a job he did until 1988.

He was the Parliamentary Sketchwriter for The Times for nearly fourteen years but gave it up at the beginning of 2002 though he remains a columnist for the paper. He also writes for the Spectator on a regular basis and for other magazines occasionally. He is a frequent television and radio broadcaster. His first book “IncaKola” in 1990 was about his travels in Peru. Among the many books he has written since then is “Great Parliamentary Scandals” and “Scorn”, a book he has edited of curses, jibes and general invective and which has just been up-dated. His autobiography “Chance Witness” was also published in 2002 and won the Politico’s Book of the Year Award. The paperback edition came out in the following year. “A Castle in Spain” telling the story of a ruin which he and his sister are restoring was first printed in 2005 and is now in paperback.

Matthew Parris has received a number of journalistic awards, including the British Press Awards’ “Columnist of the Year” for 1991, 1993, 1995 and 2011 and the “What The Papers Say” Columnist of the Year for 1992, 2004 and 2006. He was the winner of the George Orwell Prize for 2004. The Comment Award (Chairman’s Prize) he won in 2009 and in 2010 The Press Gazette made him their Commentator of the Year.

He led expeditions to Mount Kilimanjaro in 1967, 1989 and 1996 ; to Zaire in 1973, the Sahara in 1979 and to Peru and Bolivia on several occasions. In 2000 he spent four months on the remote sub-Antarctic island of Kerguelen.

A keen runner, he has competed several times in the London Marathon, holding the parliamentary record at 2 hours 32 minutes.

Parris’s style is often humorous, mainly light, but sometimes with a more serious undercurrent.