He was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford on the Roberts Gawen scholarship, and earned a first-class degree in History.

[6][7] He served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Geoffrey Howe and to John Biffen, the Trade Secretary but resigned from that position in 1981 after he refused to support the government on a vote about a retrospective windfall tax on bank profits.

After standing down from the Commons at the 1997 General Election, he was created a life peer in the 1997 Dissolution Honours;[8] on 9 June 1997 as Baron Renton of Mount Harry, of Offham in the County of East Sussex,[9][10] and took his seat in the House of Lords.

The couple lived in Offham near Lewes in East Sussex and had a holiday home on the Hebridean island of Tiree.

The couple's youngest daughter, Polly Renton (Penelope Sally Rosita), a documentary film maker, died in a car accident in 2010.