Lord David Anthony Llewellyn Owen
David Anthony Llewellyn Owen, Baron Owen, CH, PC, FRCP (born 2 July 1938) is a British politician.
Lord Owen served as British Foreign Secretary of the Callaghan Labour Government from 1977 to 1979, the youngest person in over forty years to hold the post. In 1981, Lord Owen was one of the dissident ‘Gang of Four,’ a moderate faction of the Labour Party who quit the organisation to create the Social Democratic Party (SDP), after the election of leftist Michael Foot as new party leader.
He resigned from the Labour Party when it rejected one member, one vote in February 1981 and later stepped down as leader of the Social Democratic Party, of which he was a founder member, after the party's rank-and-file membership voted to merge with the Liberal Party in 1987.
Lord Owen led the SDP from 1983 to 1987, and the ‘continuing’ SDP from 1988 to 1990. He sat in the House of Lords as a crossbencher until March 2014, and now sits as an independent social democrat.
He is the author of The Hidden Perspective: The Military Conversations 1906-1914 and Speaking for England: The Hidden Agenda of Coalition Government May 1940.
Lord Owen was also Minister of State for Health and Social Security in the period 1974-76 and an MP for Plymouth Devonport (1974-1992) and for Plymouth Sutton (1966-1974).
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