David Mellor - Political Career

Political Career

Born in Wareham, Dorset, Mellor was educated at Swanage Grammar School, and Christ's College, Cambridge, where he was Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association and a contestant on University Challenge. After briefly working for Jeffrey Archer, then a Member of Parliament (MP), while studying for his bar exams, Mellor became a barrister in 1972 and a Queens Counsel in 1987. He is currently not practising. After contesting West Bromwich East in the general election in October 1974, he became the MP for Putney aged only 30. He was re-elected on three subsequent occasions in the general elections of 1983, 1987, and 1992.

In 1981 David Mellor was made Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Energy, thus becoming Mrs Thatcher's youngest minister aged just 32. He remained her youngest minister for four years.

In 1983, Mellor was appointed to the Home Office where he was involved in several pieces of ground-breaking "Law and Order" legislation during his time as a Home Office Minister, including the ground-breaking Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which amongst other things required police to tape-record all interviews with suspects in order for such evidence to be admissible at trial; The Prosecution of Offenders Act 1985 establishing the Crown Prosecution Service; enabled the re-investigation of Miscarriages of Justice; and the significant "laboratory testing of animals" welfare legislation the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986.

The statutes were prepared by a coalition of animal welfarists led by FRAME, and scientists led by Sir Andrew Huxley (President of the Royal Society), and was jointly launched by them, Mellor, and campaigner Dr Michael Balls - Father of Ed Balls MP, who went on to become the Labour Party's shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Act gave the UK what is still the most advanced framework for the protection of laboratory member of the British Veterinary Association.

In 1987 Mellor was promoted to the Foreign Office by Margaret Thatcher, and was made responsible for the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union (before the fall of the Iron Curtain). He was briefly Minister for Health in 1988, where he was responsible for health service reforms, before he was made a Privy Councillor in 1990 by Margaret Thatcher, shortly before she resigned as Prime Minister.

Mellor was briefly Arts Minister in 1990 before entering John Major's new Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in November 1990. After the 1992 general election he remained a Cabinet Minister when he was made Secretary of State in the newly created Department for National Heritage (now the Department for Culture, Media and Sport), during which period he was vernacularly known as the "Minister for Fun" after comments he made to the waiting press on leaving 10 Downing Street on his appointment.