It also provides an account of the Heath, Thatcher and—to a lesser extent—Major governments, including his role in the development of the Poll Tax or community charge.

In 1971, Waldegrave was working at the Conservative Research Department; that March he was appointed to the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS, also referred to as the 'Think-Tank').

[7] He was one of the few openly political members of the staff and was used by Victor Rothschild, head of the CPRS, as a link with both the Conservative party (then in government) and the outside, non-Civil Service world.

He was regarded as a member of the "wet" or moderate tendency of the Conservative Party, and despite this progressed well from the backbenches in Margaret Thatcher's government.

However, Sir Richard Scott exonerated Waldegrave of "duplicitous intent" in wrongly describing the Government's policy.

After losing his Commons seat to Valerie Davey in the 1997 general election, he entered the House of Lords being created a life peer as Baron Waldegrave of North Hill, of Chewton Mendip in the County of Somerset, on 28 July 1999.

[12][13] He is married to Caroline Burrows, cookery writer and managing director of Leith's School of Food and Wine.

[citation needed] In 1993, when he was the British science minister Waldegrave offered a prize for the best lay explanation of the Higgs Boson.

He had observed that British taxpayers were paying a lot of money (in contributions to CERN) for something very few of them understood, and he challenged UK particle physicists to explain, in a simple manner on one piece of paper, 'What is the Higgs Boson, and why do we want to find it?