67 Facts About David Owen

David Owen was a Member of Parliament over 26 years from 1966 to 1992.

In 1981, David Owen was one of the "Gang of Four" who left the Labour Party to found the Social Democratic Party.

David Owen was the only member of the Gang of Four who did not join the Liberal Democrats, which was founded when the SDP merged with the Liberal Party.

David Owen led the Social Democratic Party from 1983 to 1987, and the continuing SDP from 1988 to 1990.

David Owen first quit as Labour's spokesman on defence in 1972 in protest at the Labour leader and former Prime Minister Harold Wilson's attitude to the European Economic Community; he left the Labour Shadow cabinet over the same issue later; and over unilateral disarmament in November 1980 when Michael Foot became Labour leader.

David Owen resigned from the Labour Party when it rejected one member, one vote in February 1981 and later as Leader of the Social Democratic Party, which he had helped to found, after the party's rank-and-file membership voted to merge with the Liberal Party.

David Owen was born in 1938 to Welsh parents in Plympton, near the city of Plymouth, in Devon, England.

David Owen began clinical training at St Thomas's Hospital in October 1959.

David Owen was deeply affected by the Suez crisis of 1956, when Anthony Eden's Conservative government launched a military operation to retrieve the Suez Canal after Nasser's decision to nationalise it.

In 1960, David Owen joined the Vauxhall branch of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society.

David Owen was neurology and psychiatric registrar at St Thomas's Hospital for two years, as assistant to Dr William Sargant, then Research Fellow on the Medical Unit doing research into Parkinsonian trauma and neuropharmacology.

At the next general election, in 1966, David Owen returned to his home town and was elected Labour Member of Parliament for the Plymouth Sutton constituency.

David Owen managed to hold on to it in the 1979 general election, again by a narrow margin.

David Owen remained as MP for Plymouth Devonport until his elevation to a peerage in 1992.

From 1968 to 1970, David Owen served as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Navy in Harold Wilson's first government.

David Owen has been outspoken that his policy of "Self-Sufficiency" was not put into place and gave rise to the Tainted Blood Scandal which saw 5,000 British Haemophiliacs infected with Hepatitis C, 1,200 of those were infected with HIV.

In September 1976, David Owen was appointed by the new Prime Minister of five months, James Callaghan, as a Minister of State at the Foreign Office, and was consequently admitted to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom.

Five months later the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Crosland, died suddenly and David Owen was appointed his successor.

David Owen wrote a book entitled Human Rights and championed that cause in Africa and in the Soviet Union.

David Owen later admitted to at one stage contemplating the assassination of Idi Amin while Foreign Secretary but settled instead to backing with money for arms purchases to President Nyerere of Tanzania in his armed attack on Uganda which led to the exile of Amin to Saudi Arabia.

In 1982, uneasy about the Alliance, David Owen challenged Jenkins for the leadership of the SDP, but was defeated by 26,256 votes to 20,864.

In 1982, during the Falklands War, David Owen spoke at the Bilderberg meeting advocating sanctions against Argentina.

David Owen is widely regarded as having been, at the very least, a competent party leader.

Owen kept a high profile, so much so that Spitting Image, the satirical puppet show, depicted the Liberal leader David Steel popping up like a jack-in-the-box in Owen's pocket.

David Owen succeeded in keeping the party in the public eye and in maintaining its independence from the Liberals for the length of the 1983 Parliament.

In 1987 immediately after the election, the Liberal leader David Owen Steel proposed a full merger of the Liberal and SDP parties and was supported for the SDP by Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers.

David Owen rejected this notion outright, on the grounds that he and other Social Democrats wished to remain faithful to social democracy as it was practised within Western Europe, and it was unlikely that any merged party would be able to do this, even if it was under his leadership.

At the request of two of the remaining SDP MPs, John Cartwright and Rosie Barnes, David Owen continued to lead a much smaller continuing SDP, with three MPs in total.

David Owen blamed the SDP's demise on the reforms which had been taking place in the Labour Party since Kinnock's election as leader in 1983.

David Owen then served the remainder of his term as an independent MP and after the 1992 General Election was made a life peer, nominated by then Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, with the title, Baron Owen, of the City of Plymouth in the County of Devon.

David Owen was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Plymouth University in 1992.

David Owen maintained his long-standing position that he would never join the Conservative Party, although the memoirs of at least three of John Major's cabinet ministers refer to Major being quite keen to appoint David Owen to his cabinet, but threats of resignation from within the Cabinet prevented him from doing so.

David Owen was very good on the Northern Ireland terrorist business.

David Owen was approached privately by Tony Blair, then leader of the Opposition, in 1996 on whether he was ready to support New Labour.

Lord David Owen declined mainly because he disagreed with Blair's intention, as Prime Minister, to join the eurozone.

David Owen declined, because though he did not want a Conservative government, he wanted the Liberal Democrats to do sufficiently well to ensure a greatly reduced Labour majority.

In September 2007, it was reported in the British press that Lord David Owen had met the new Prime Minister Gordon Brown and afterwards had refused to rule out supporting Labour at the next general election.

David Owen helped create the web-based Charter 2010 to explain and promote the potential of a hung parliament.

In January 2011, David Owen said that his "heart was with Labour" and that he looked forward to the time when he could vote Labour again.

David Owen added that what hampered him in the past was the way the Labour Party elects its leader and it was very necessary for the electoral college arrangement to be reformed and he refused to rule out joining the Labour Party in the future.

David Owen added that he was "pleasantly surprised that the manifesto was a lot better than expected", and praised Corbyn for showing "more flexibility in taking account of Labour MPs and party members' views than ever Michael Foot did" in reference to the manifesto's commitments to NATO and nuclear weapons despite Corbyn's lifelong pacifism.

However in March 2019, David Owen said he would not support Labour, criticising Corbyn's leadership for its failure to "unequivocally" root out antisemitism in the Labour Party.

In October 2019, David Owen warned that Labour would lose potentially 5 million Leave voters who supported them due to its stance for a second Brexit referendum, and said that Labour under Corbyn and John McDonnell reminded voters of "the Labour Party of the 1980s".

David Owen criticised McDonnell's push to change Labour's policy to a second referendum stance.

David Owen come badly out of Adam Le Bor's book, Milosevic: A Biography: "After he was appointed the European Community negotiator for the former Yugoslavia in 1992, Lord Owen and his wife Debbie cultivated a personal friendship with Milosevic and his wife Mira, flying in a helicopter to lunch with them in one of Tito's former palaces and offering publishing advice to Mira Milosevic".

David Owen was consistently supported by all 15 EU Member States and the German Presidency in July 1994 urged him to remain as did the French Presidency in January 1995.

David Owen was made a Companion of Honour for his services in the former Yugoslavia in 1994.

In January 1995, Lord David Owen wrote to Francois Mitterrand as President of the European Union to say that he wished to step down before the end of the French presidency.

David Owen testified as a witness of the court in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of FR Yugoslavia.

Lord David Owen has continued to speak out on issues of international affairs including on nuclear proliferation and constrained intervention.

In 2009 the culmination of these efforts, the privately funded and independent "Archer Report" in which Lord David Owen was heavily involved, published its findings but was thwarted because it had no power to compel witnesses as it was not a statutory public inquiry.

Lord David Owen has regularly told the media that he is not a conspiracy theorist but that he does suspect there has been a cover-up carried out by the Civil Service and that this was done after prosecutions and jail sentences were brought against government officials in France.

In October 2016, the Civil Service Commission refused a request to investigate Lord David Owen's destroyed documents and separately the Department of Health advised that "the Department does not have any plans to make public the identity of junior officials involved in this matter".

On 22 September 2020, Lord David Owen gave evidence to the Infected Blood Inquiry in London.

David Owen had previously been a supporter of Britain's membership of the European Union, but in recent years has opposed what he sees as the increased federalisation of the EU, citing examples such as a unified currency, a unified defence force and a unified foreign policy as "structure[s] for a United States of Europe".

David Owen called for a referendum before Britain's ratification of the Lisbon treaty, and expressed concerns about proposals for the creation of a 'European Rapid Reaction Force'.

In June 2012 Lord David Owen published Europe Restructured, outlining a blueprint for restructuring the EU to allow for those countries that wish to be part of a more integrated eurozone to be facilitated while those who may only want to belong to a Single Market community are enabled to do so.

David Owen stated that a referendum on the UK's relationship with the EU was inevitable.

David Owen was interviewed in 2012 as part of The History of Parliament's oral history project.

Lord David Owen was chairman of Yukos International UK BV, a division of the former Russian petroleum company Yukos, from 2002 to 2005.

David Owen was non-executive chairman of Europe Steel Ltd and consultant to Epion Holdings, owned by Alisher Usmanov until 2015.

From 2009 to 2014 Lord David Owen served on the board of Texas-based Hyperdynamics Corporation, an oil concern with an exclusive lease to an offshore area of the Republic of Guinea in west Africa.

David Owen served on the board of Coats Viyella from 1994 to 2001.

David Owen was the Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, from 1996 to 2009.

Lord David Owen is chairman of the Trustees of the Daedalus Trust established to promote and provide funds for the interdisciplinary study of how 'the intoxication of power' in all walks of life can affect personality and decision making.

David Owen married Deborah Owen, an American literary agent, in 1968.

David Owen was a main character in Steve Waters' 2017 play Limehouse, which premiered at the Donmar Warehouse; David Owen was portrayed by Tom Goodman-Hill, with Nathalie Armin playing his wife.