Harris, the son of a tramways inspector, was "one of four children born to working-class parents on a council estate in Tottenham, north-east London".
Friedrich Hayek had suggested that an intellectual counterweight through think tanks was necessary to combat the prevailing post-war consensus around Keynesianism and the Butskellism of Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell.
Harris, together with editorial director Arthur Seldon, built the IEA and its affiliates of Atlas Network into a bastion of free-market economics and neoliberalism, which supplanted the post-war Keynesian paradigm.
[3][4][5] The IEA developed links with Austrian School and monetarist (from the Chicago School) economists, such as Hayek, Gottfried Haberler, Harry Gordon Johnson, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James M. Buchanan, and published many pamphlets and papers on public finance issues, such as taxation, pensions, education, health, transport, and exchange rates.
In 1979, during Margaret Thatcher's first few months in power, he was made a life peer as Baron Harris of High Cross, of Tottenham in Greater London.
[6] Despite his strong affiliation with Tory free marketeers, Harris sat on the crossbenches in the House of Lords to show his independence from any political party.
Harris was interviewed about his work at the IEA and the rise of Thatcherism for the 2006 BBC TV documentary series Tory!
[9][10] Harris died suddenly of a ruptured aortic aneurysm at his home in North London on the morning of 19 October 2006.