Early Life and Career
Born Michael Denzil Portillo in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England, Portillo took the name Xavier at confirmation. His father was an exiled Spanish republican, Luis Gabriel Portillo (1907–1993). His mother is Cora (née Blyth); her father was John Blyth, a prosperous linen mill owner from Kirkcaldy. An early brush with fame came in 1961 at the age of 8, when Portillo starred in a television advertisement for Ribena, a blackcurrant cordial drink. He was educated at Stanburn Primary School in Stanmore, Middlesex, and Harrow County School for Boys and then won a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he came under the influence of Maurice Cowling.
Portillo graduated in 1975 with a first-class degree in history, and after a brief stint with Ocean Transport and Trading Co., a freight firm, he joined the Conservative Research Department in 1976. Following the Conservative victory in 1979 he became a government adviser. He left to work for Kerr-McGee Oil from 1981–1983 and fought his first, unsuccessful, election in the 1983 general election, in the Labour-held seat of Birmingham Perry Barr, losing against Jeff Rooker.
Portillo has been married to Carolyn Eadie since 1982.
Read more about this topic: Michael Portillo
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“... it is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)