Lord Ashburton also sat on the boards of Jaguar Cars, Dunlop Rubber, and Royal Insurance.

His maternal grandparents were Lewis Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt, and Mary Ethel Burns, daughter of Walter Hayes Burns of New York City, granddaughter of Junius Spencer Morgan and niece of American banking magnate J. P. Morgan.

Her paternal grandparents were John Strange "Jack" Spencer-Churchill and Lady Gwendoline Theresa Mary Bertie.

The second Lady Ashburton is a director of Borderline, a privately owned textile company,[1] and has three children from a previous marriage.

[5] He succeeded to the Barony of Ashburton on 12 June 1991, and became a Knight Companion of the Garter in 1994[6] – one of the rare cases where both father and son were appointed to this order.