The son of Douglas Austin Reed and his wife Mary Ellen Philpott, he was educated at Gresham's School in Norfolk and University College, Oxford.
Reed served his National Service with the Royal Navy from 1956 to 1958, and from 1963 to 1966 worked and studied the EEC at Brussels, Bruges, Leiden, Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Paris, Rome, Bologna and Geneva.
Reed joined the Royal Navy for his National Service and as a young naval officer he took part in Operation Grapple, Britain's first series of thermonuclear tests held in the Central Pacific in 1957.
During his time as an undergraduate he joined the editorial staff of the magazine Isis, campaigned for the abolition of capital punishment and held office in the Oxford University Conservative Association.
One of them was about marine pollution, which was written when he was a director of the Association Européenne Océanique (Eurocean), an organisation founded to promote European cooperation in the exploration of the deep sea.
[2] In September, 1971, in a telegram to the prime minister of the day, Edward Heath, Reed proposed the forcible repatriation of citizens of the Republic of Ireland living in the UK as a means of persuading the Irish premier, Jack Lynch, to act against terrorists.