Mark Lennox-Boyd

Who is Mark Lennox-Boyd?

Sir Mark Alexander Lennox-Boyd is a British Conservative politician and a son of the 1st Viscount Boyd of Merton.

Lennox-Boyd was MP for Morecambe and Lonsdale from 1979 to 1983, and the Morecambe and Lunesdale from 1983 until his defeat by Labour's Geraldine Smith in 1997. He served as a government whip and a Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

He is married to Arabella Parisi, who is better known as Arabella Lennox-Boyd. Lady Lennox-Boyd was born in Italy, but left to settle in England where she later undertook a course in Landscape Architecture at Thames Polytechnic, which went on to become part of the University of Greenwich.

In a letter to Margaret Thatcher, Lennox-Boyd, then a Foreign Office official, expressed doubts about the new racially-mixed government of Zimbabwe: "A wise European said to me in Salisbury that while a white government in Rhodesia with all its apparatus of inherited authority could continue even if unsuccessful, . . . [a] black one would not be tolerated by black people for more than a month or two unless it was successful".