Before entering politics, he worked in junior managerial roles at Xerox, Rank and Ford Motor Company before becoming a management consultant with Deloitte and Dexion.

His political views were apparent from his maiden speech, in which he attacked the Sex Equality Bill, and he was an early member of the No Turning Back group.

In Parliament, he served on the Employment select committee in 1986 until later in the year when he was appointed as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Angela Rumbold at the Department for Education and Science.

[citation needed] He entered the government of Margaret Thatcher when she appointed him as the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry in 1988, as minister for consumer affairs.

Forth was then Peter Lilley's campaign manager until the latter withdrew, then supported John Redwood, and finally backed eventual winner William Hague.

Forth refused the offer of a place in the Conservative shadow ministerial team and instead became a leading backbench irritant to the Labour government, engaging in "a Parliamentary form of guerrilla warfare".

[8] Forth's speciality was the filibuster: as Labour MPs found themselves often required to remain in Parliament past midnight, they called him "Bloody Eric Forth" (a reaction Forth welcomed).

After William Hague announced his support for an "election compact" promoted by the Commission for Racial Equality in 2001, Forth was quoted as saying at a private dinner: "All this sucking up to minorities is ridiculous; there are millions of people in this country who are white, Anglo-Saxon and bigoted and they need to be represented.

[citation needed] Forth was married to Linda St. Clair on 11 March 1967 and they had two daughters before their divorce in 1994; he remarried later that year to Carroll Goff, gaining a stepson.