Christopher Soames was previously Member of Parliament for Bedford from 1950 to 1966.
15 Facts About Christopher Soames
2.
Christopher Soames held several government posts and attained Cabinet rank.
3.
Christopher Soames's parents divorced while he was a boy, and his mother married her second husband Charles Rhys, by whom she had further children including Richard Rhys, 9th Baron Dynevor.
4.
Christopher Soames was educated at West Downs School, Eton College, and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst.
5.
Christopher Soames obtained a commission as an officer in the Coldstream Guards just before World War II broke out.
6.
Christopher Soames was the Conservative MP for Bedford from 1950 to 1966 and served under Anthony Eden as Under-Secretary of State for Air from 1955 to 1957 and under Harold Macmillan as Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty from 1957 to 1958.
7.
Christopher Soames served under Macmillan as Secretary of State for War from 1958 to 1960 and then in the cabinets of Macmillan and his successor Alec Douglas-Home as Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from July 1960 to 1964.
8.
Between 1965 and 1966, Christopher Soames was Shadow Foreign Secretary under Edward Heath.
9.
Christopher Soames lost his seat in Parliament in the 1966 election.
10.
Christopher Soames was then a Vice-President of the European Commission from 1973 to 1976.
11.
Christopher Soames was considered as a potential challenger to Edward Heath in the 1975 Conservative Party leadership election.
12.
Christopher Soames was created a life peer on 19 April 1978 as Baron Soames, of Fletching in the County of East Sussex.
13.
Christopher Soames served as the interim governor of Southern Rhodesia from 1979 to 1980, charged with administering the terms of the Lancaster House Agreement and overseeing its governmental transition into Zimbabwe.
14.
Lord Christopher Soames married Mary Churchill, the youngest child of Winston and Clementine Churchill, on 11 February 1947.
15.
Christopher Soames's ashes were buried within the Churchill plot at St Martin's Church, Bladon, near Woodstock, Oxfordshire.