[5] He was educated at Jennings Street Secondary School, Swindon, Woolwich Polytechnic and Ruskin College, Oxford.

[9] He was also reported as having taught his father to drive, but having given up trying to perform the same favour for his wife, applying what forty years later appears as imprudent candour in characterising the attempt as "traumatic".

[9] In March 1969, he announced that the Government planned to switch road speed limits to kilometres per hour in 1973.

[10] However, all plans for road signs to go metric were subsequently postponed by the following Conservative Government, with "no alternative date in mind".

[4] In 1978 he announced that he had become a supporter of Margaret Thatcher, who had been his shadow counterpart when he was Minister of Transport, and intended to vote Conservative at the forthcoming general election, held in 1979.

[12] Thatcher won the election, and she created him a life peer as Baron Marsh, of Mannington in the County of Wiltshire on 15 July 1981.