Henry Paul Guinness Channon, Baron Kelvedon, PC (9 October 1935 – 27 January 2007) was Conservative MP for Southend West for 38 years, from 1959 until 1997.

[1][2] Channon won the nomination to his father's seat ahead of 129 other applicants and in spite of a campaign in Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express against the apparent nepotism.

[2] He was one of few Conservative MPs to support the 1965 bill that ended capital punishment, and also opposed the unilateral declaration of independence by Ian Smith's Rhodesia.

[3] In opposition, Conservative leader Edward Heath appointed Channon as a spokesman on public building and works in 1965, and then on arts in 1967.

[4] Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw met IRA leader Sean MacStiofain and other Republicans at Channon's house in Chelsea on 7 July 1972.

He took charge of the department for two short periods, after Cecil Parkinson resigned following the Sara Keays affair in 1983, and while his successor, Norman Tebbit, recovered from his injuries sustained in the Brighton bombing in 1984.

[2] In addition, proposed sales of troubled nationalised carmarkers British Leyland to General Motors and of Austin Rover to Ford also fell through.

His tenure as Transport Secretary was blighted by several major transport disasters: 31 died in the King's Cross fire on 18 November 1987; 35 were killed when three trains crashed near Britain's busiest railway station in the Clapham Junction rail crash on 12 December 1988; 270 died when Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down by a bomb over Scottish town of Lockerbie in the Lockerbie Disaster on 21 December 1988; and 44 died when a British Midland plane crashed beside the M1 motorway in the Kegworth air disaster on 8 January 1989.

He was roughly treated in the House of Commons by Labour's transport spokesman, John Prescott, who pilloried him for underinvestment in the rail network, and for taking a family holiday to Mustique shortly after the Lockerbie disaster.

British investigative journalist, Paul Foot, in a 1994 article for the London Review of Books, described what happened: The American investigative columnist, Jack Anderson, has had some scoops in his time but none more significant than his revelation – in January 1990 – that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to 'cool it' on the subject.

On what seems to have been the very same day [in March 1989], perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher's Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five prominent political correspondents at a lunch at the Garrick Club.

So sensational was the revelation that at least one of the five journalists broke ranks; and the news that the Lockerbie villains would soon be behind bars in Scotland was divulged to the public.

Channon harboured hopes of becoming the fourth member of his family to become Speaker of the House of Commons,[1][2] but he withdrew from the election to replace Bernard Weatherill in 1992.

In 1986, 22-year-old Olivia died from the effects of drink and drugs during a party in the Christ Church, Oxford, rooms of Count Gottfried von Bismarck.