Sir Edward William Spencer Ford GCVO KCB ERD DL FRSA (24 July 1910 – 19 November 2006) was a courtier in the Royal Households of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II.

She used the phrase in a speech to describe a year in which one of her four children was divorced, two more formally separated from their spouses, and Windsor Castle caught fire.

His father was the Very Reverend Lionel Ford, headmaster of Repton and later of Harrow, and Dean of York from 1926 to 1932; his mother Mary Catherine was a daughter of the Right Reverend Edward Stuart Talbot, Bishop of Winchester, and education campaigner Lavinia Lyttelton; an uncle was Neville Stuart Talbot Bishop of Pretoria; another uncle was a royal chaplain.

After the war, at the invitation of Sir Alan Lascelles, he entered Royal Service as Assistant Private Secretary to King George VI, 1946–52, and then served in the same office to Elizabeth II until 1967.

He became a close friend of Group Captain Peter Townsend, an equerry whose love affair with Princess Margaret caused a crisis early in Queen Elizabeth's reign.

He was secretary of the Pilgrim Trust from 1967 to 1975, and also managed the estate of his late father-in-law, Lord Brand, at Eydon Hall in Northamptonshire.

Ford used the Latin phrase "annus horribilis" in a sympathetic letter to the Queen in 1992, after a series of unfortunate events, including a major fire in Windsor Castle.

In a later television documentary to mark the 40th anniversary of the Queen's accession, Ford chided himself for a grammatical error, saying that, in order to describe a horrible year, he properly should have written "annus horrendus".