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Name: Lord David Owen
Field:
Politician
Productions:
An Evening With David Owen
After Dinner Speaker Biography: David Anthony Llewellyn Owen, Baron Owen, CH, PC (born July 2, 1938) is a British politician, Chancellor of the University of Liverpool and one of the founders of the British Social Democratic Party (SDP). He led the SDP from 1983 to 1987 and the re-formed SDP from 1988 to 1990. He is also known for becoming the youngest person in over forty years to hold the post of British Foreign Secretary (from 1977 to 1979) and as one of the authors of the failed Vance-Owen and Owen-Stoltenberg peace plans offered during the Bosnian War. He has been a controversial figure for much of his career, inspiring great devotion among close followers but also disaffection due to perceived arrogance.
Owen had been long regarded as a serial resigner. He had quit as Labour's spokesman on Defence in 1972 in protest at the Labour Leader Harold Wilson's attitude to the EEC; he left the Labour Shadow cabinet over the same issue later; and over unilateral disarmament in November 1980 when Michael Foot became Labour leader. He resigned from the Labour Party when it rejected "one member, one vote" in February 1981. He resigned as Leader of the Social Democratic Party which he had helped to found when the party's rank-and-file membership voted to merge with the Liberal Party" [Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia 2001 ; p157-158].
He married Deborah Owen (née Schabert), an American literary agent, in 1968. They have two sons and one daughter.
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