He subsequently studied at Clare College, Cambridge, and Yale University before working for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and then the Conservative Research Department.

By the 2010s and 2020s he was more openly critical of some of the groups he had been affiliated with, criticising Conservative leaders Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as well as Stonewall's move to include trans rights in its remit.

[citation needed] At the age of 19, Parris drove across Africa to Europe in a Morris Oxford; the trip was traumatically punctuated when, he reports in his 2002 autobiography, he and his female companion were attacked, and he was forced to witness her rape.

[2] He later attributed his embrace of conservatism to an early reading of George Orwell's Animal Farm: "An admiration for [the pigs'] intelligence and sense of order dawned in me.

[citation needed] In the late 1970s, he was awarded an RSPCA medal — presented by Thatcher, then Leader of the Opposition) — for jumping into the River Thames to rescue a dog.

[11] As an MP he took part in a World in Action documentary during 1984 requiring him to live in Newcastle for a week on £26.80, the then state social security payment set for a single adult by the government he supported as a Conservative.

[14][15] Parris resigned as an MP by applying for the Crown position of Steward of the Manor of Northstead and left Parliament specifically to take over from Brian Walden as host of ITV's influential Sunday lunchtime current-affairs series Weekend World in 1986.

[16] In 2007, Parris presented two light-hearted but caustic documentaries for Radio 4 on politicians' use of cliché and jargon, entitled Not My Words, Mr Speaker.

[17] On 8 July 2011, on Radio 4's Any Questions?, at the height of the furore surrounding the alleged illegal and corrupt activities of News of the World journalists, Parris eulogised the newspaper and gave an enthusiastic appreciation of what he considered the virtues and positive achievements of Rupert Murdoch.

In 2005, he published A Castle in Spain about his family's project to refurbish a derelict sixteenth-century mansion, L'Avenc, in Catalonia, close to the foothills of the Pyrenees, and make his home there.

For example, in a 2007 article in The Times he wrote a satirical article which stated, "A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists",[11][21] which attracted two hundred letters to the Press Complaints Commission[22] Parris issued an apology: "I offended many with my Christmas attack on cyclists.

[27] The anti-racism group Hope not Hate responded to Parris saying "The Times have published an article advocating for eradicating the way of life of an entire ethnic minority.

[30] In 2022, Parris described Liz Truss as "a planet-sized mass of overconfidence and ambition teetering upon a pinhead of a political brain".

[31] In July 2024, a few weeks short of his 75th birthday, Parris stopped writing his long-running Saturday opinion column in The Times,[32] in which he mostly commented on British politics.

He spent the Antarctic winter of 2000 on the French possession of Grande Terre, part of the Kerguelen Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, with a few dozen over-winterers, mostly researchers.

[38][39][40] In an interview on Newsnight, during the Ron Davies scandal of 1998, he told Jeremy Paxman that there were two gay members of the then Labour Cabinet, one being Peter Mandelson.

[citation needed] In August 2006 Parris entered into a civil partnership with his long-term partner, Julian Glover, a speechwriter for David Cameron and a former political journalist at The Guardian.

His personal best was 2:32:57, achieved in 1985 at the age of 35,[43] a record which Total Politics in 2018 said "looks unlikely to be smashed any time soon"; John Lamont, the fastest of 15 MPs in the marathon that year, finished at 3:38:03.

[43] In October 2017, the commentator Iain Dale placed Parris at Number 84 in his list of 'The Top 100 Most Influential People on the Right', describing him as "the pre-eminent columnist of his generation".