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David Anthony Llewellyn Owen, Baron Owen, (born 2 July 1938) is a British politician and physician who served as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs as a Labour Party MP under James Callaghan from 1977 to 1979, and later led the Social Democratic Party (SDP). He was a Member of Parliament for 26 years, from 1966 to 1992.
Owen served as British Foreign Secretary from 1977 to 1979, at the age of 38 the youngest person in over forty years to hold the post. In 1981, Owen was one of the "Gang of Four" who left the Labour Party to found the Social Democratic Party. He was the only member of the Gang of Four who did not join the Liberal Democrats, which was founded when the SDP merged with the Liberal Party. Owen led the Social Democratic Party from 1983 to 1987, and the continuing SDP from 1988 to 1990. Appointed as a life peer in 1992, he sat in the House of Lords as a crossbencher until March 2014, and sat as an "independent social democrat" until his retirement in 2024.
In the course of his career, Owen has held, and resigned from, a number of senior posts. He first quit as Labour's spokesman on defence in 1972 in protest at the Labour leader and former prime minister Harold Wilson's attitude to the European Economic Community; he left the Labour Shadow cabinet over the same issue later; and over unilateral disarmament in November 1980 when Michael Foot became Labour leader. He resigned from the Labour Party when it rejected one member, one vote in February 1981 and later as Leader of the Social Democratic Party, which he had helped to found, after the party's rank-and-file membership voted to merge with the Liberal Party.
Owen was deeply affected by the Suez crisis of 1956, when Anthony Eden's Conservative government launched a military operation to retrieve the Suez Canal after Nasser's decision to nationalise it. At the time, aged 18, he was working in a labouring job before going to Cambridge. Owen later told Kenneth Harris:
There was Hugh Gaitskell ... criticizing Eden, and here were these men working alongside me, who should have been his natural supporters, furious with him. The Daily Mirror backed Gaitskell, but these men were tearing up their Daily Mirrors every day. ... My working mates were solidly in favour of Eden. It was not only that they taught me how people like them think; they also opened my eyes to how I should think myself. From then on I never identified with the liberal – with a small 'l' – establishment. Through that experience I became suspicious of a kind of automatic sogginess which you come across in many aspects of British life. ... The rather defeatist, even traitorous attitude reflected in the pre-war Apostles at Cambridge. I suppose it underlay the appeasement years. Its modern equivalent is a resigned attitude to Britain's continuous post-war economic decline.David Marquand, The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair (London: Phoenix, 1999), p. 203.
From 1968 to 1970, Owen served as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Royal Navy in Harold Wilson's first government. After Labour's defeat in the 1970 general election, he became the party's Junior Defence Spokesman until 1972 when he resigned with Roy Jenkins over Labour's opposition to the European Community. On Labour's return to government in March 1974, he became Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health before being promoted to Minister of State for Health in July 1974.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Wayback Machine: David Owen has been outspoken that his policy of "Self-Sufficiency" was not put into place (although he was, himself, Minister of Health) and gave rise to the Tainted Blood Scandal which saw 5,000 British Haemophiliacs infected with Hepatitis C, 1,200 of those were also infected with HIV. It was later described in the House of Lords as "the worst treatment disaster in the history of the National Health Service".
In September 1976, Owen was appointed by the new prime minister of five months, James Callaghan, as a Minister of State at the Foreign Office, and was consequently admitted to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom. Five months later, however, the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Crosland, died suddenly and Owen was appointed his successor. Aged 38, he became the youngest Foreign Secretary since Anthony Eden in 1935.
In 1977, Owen was condemned by Black civil rights leader Billy Strachan for refusing to prevent the hanging of two Black Bermudians in the British colony. As Foreign Secretary, Owen was identified with the Anglo-American plan for Rhodesia, which formed the basis for the Lancaster House Agreement, negotiated by his Tory successor, Lord Carrington, in December 1979. The Contact Group sponsored UN Resolution 435 in 1978 on which Namibia moved to independence twelve years later. He wrote a book entitled Human Rights and championed that cause in Africa and in the Soviet Union. He later admitted to at one stage contemplating the assassination of Idi Amin while Foreign Secretary but settled instead on backing Julius Nyerere of Tanzania with money for arms purchases for his attack on Uganda which led to the exile of Amin to Saudi Arabia.
Shortly after Labour's defeat in the 1979 general election and following the election of a new Shadow Cabinet Callaghan moved Owen from the position of Shadow Foreign Secretary to Shadow Energy Secretary, a move which was reported as being a demotion.
Eighteen months after Labour lost power, the staunchly left-wing politician Michael Foot was elected party leader, despite vocal opposition from Labour Party moderates (including Owen), sparking a crisis over the party's future.
Early in 1981, Owen and three other senior moderate Labour politicians – Roy Jenkins, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams – announced their intention to break away from the Labour Party to form a "Council for Social Democracy". The announcement became known as the Limehouse Declaration and the four as the "Gang of Four". The council they formed became the Social Democratic Party (SDP), with a collective leadership. Although Owen was one of the founding members of the party, he was not always enthusiastic about creating a schism on the centre-left, saying to the Glasgow Herald in January 1981 that he felt "haunted by the possibility that, if the Labour Party splits, the centre left will never again form the Government in Britain".
Twenty-eight other Labour MPs and one Conservative MP (Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler) joined the new party. In late 1981, the SDP formed the SDP–Liberal Alliance with the Liberal Party to strengthen both parties' chances in the UK's "first past the post" electoral system. The alliance performed so well that for much of the early part of 1982, it appeared that it would become a centre-left coalition government at the next election. In 1982, uneasy about the Alliance, Owen challenged Jenkins for the leadership of the SDP, but was defeated by 26,256 votes to 20,864. In the following year's general election, the Alliance gained 25% of the vote, only slightly behind the Labour Party, but because of the first-past-the-post voting system, it won only 23 out of 650 seats. Although elected, Jenkins resigned the SDP leadership and Owen succeeded to it without a contest among the six remaining SDP MPs.
In 1982, during the Falklands War, Owen spoke at the Bilderberg meeting advocating sanctions against Argentina. Ironically, the success of the war ended any hope that SDP might have had of winning the 1983 election. The Tories were proving unpopular largely due to high unemployment and the early 1980s recession. However, Britain's success in the conflict saw Margaret Thatcher and her Tory government surge back to the top of the opinion polls, and her position was strengthened further by the end of the year as the recession died down.
However, the progress of the SDP–Liberal Alliance as a whole was hampered, with policy splits between the two parties. The first was over the miners' strike of 1984–85, with Owen and most of the SDP favouring a fairly tough line but the Liberals preferring compromise and negotiation. More significantly the Alliance had a dispute over the future of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. Owen and the SDP favoured replacing Polaris with Trident as a matter of some importance, whereas most Liberals were either indifferent to the issue or committed disarmers. The SDP favoured a radical social market economy, while the Liberals mostly favoured a more interventionist, Corporatism style approach. The cumulative effect of these divisions was to make the Alliance appear less credible as a potential government in the eyes of the electorate.
Moreover, Owen, unlike Jenkins, faced an increasingly moderate Labour Party under Neil Kinnock and a dynamic Conservative government. The 1987 general election was as disappointing for the Alliance as the 1983 election and it lost one seat. Nevertheless, it won over 23% of the vote – at that time, the second-largest third-placed vote in British politics since 1929.
The Liberal Party and SDP merged to form the Social and Liberal Democrats (SLD) in March 1988, renamed the Liberal Democrats in October 1989.
At the request of two of the remaining SDP MPs, John Cartwright and Rosie Barnes, Owen continued to lead a much smaller continuing SDP, with three MPs in total. The party polled well at its first election, its candidate coming a close second in the 1989 Richmond by-election, but thereafter a string of poor and ultimately disastrous by-election results followed, including coming behind the Official Monster Raving Loony Party in the Bootle by-election of May 1990, prompting Owen to wind up the party in 1990. Owen blamed the SDP's demise on the reforms which had been taking place in the Labour Party since Kinnock's election as leader in 1983.
Some branches, however, continued to function using the SDP name; Bridlington's was still extant in 2006.
Lord Holme later blamed Owen for the Alliance's failure to make a breakthrough at the 1987 general election, believing that a merged party would have performed much better and possibly gained more votes and seats than Labour.
During the April 1992 election campaign, Owen writing in The Mail on Sunday newspaper advised voters to vote Liberal Democrat where they had a chance of victory and to vote Conservative rather than let Neil Kinnock become prime minister. Owen maintained his long-standing position that he would never join the Conservative Party, although the memoirs of at least three of John Major's cabinet ministers refer to Major being quite keen to appoint Owen to his cabinet, but threats of resignation from within the Cabinet prevented him from doing so. When asked in a conversation with Woodrow Wyatt on 18 December 1988 whether she would have Owen in her government if approached by him, Margaret Thatcher replied: "Well, not straight away. I don't think I would do it straight away. He was very good on the Northern Ireland terrorist business. He's wasting his life now. It's so tragic. He's got real ability and it ought to be used".Sarah Curtis (ed.), The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt. Volume One (London: Pan, 1999), p. 691. In another conversation with Wyatt on 4 June 1990 Thatcher said Owen's natural home was the Conservative Party.Sarah Curtis (ed.), The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt. Volume Two (London: Pan, 2000), p. 305.
Owen was approached privately by Tony Blair, then leader of the Opposition, in 1996 on whether he was ready to support New Labour. Lord Owen declined mainly because he disagreed with Blair's intention, as prime minister, to join the eurozone.David Owen, Time to Declare: Second Innings (Politico's, 2009) In 2019, Owen recounted that Blair implied that a “political future” awaited him if he rejoined Labour. Owen said he "was very tempted, but then Blair started to talk about the euro.” Owen concluded that Blair was “passionately committed” to taking Britain into the Euro; thus, Owen said no.
In May 2005, he was approached two days before the general election by someone very close to Tony Blair to endorse Labour. He declined, because though he did not want a Conservative government, he wanted the Liberal Democrats to do sufficiently well to ensure a greatly reduced Labour majority.David Owen In Sickness and in Power p.305 In September 2007, it was reported in the British press that Lord Owen had met the new prime minister Gordon Brown and afterwards had refused to rule out supporting Labour at the next general election. It later emerged that he could have been part of the "government of all the talents" initiative advising on the NHS, but Owen declined. In October 2009 he wrote an article in The Times predicting that the Conservatives, then well ahead in the opinion polls, were unlikely to win an outright majority. He helped create the web-based Charter 2010 to explain and promote the potential of a hung parliament. The website campaign was launched in January 2010 while the Conservatives still appeared on course to win outright. Within weeks the polls changed and the website became a major source of information about hung parliaments. In May 2010 The Sunday Times called Owen "the prophet of the coalition".
During the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum he signed a letter in The Guardian stating that he opposed AV but would continue to campaign for proportional representation.
In January 2011, Owen said that his "heart was with Labour" and that he looked forward to the time when he could vote Labour again. He added that what hampered him in the past was the way the Labour Party elects its leader and it was very necessary for the electoral college arrangement to be reformed and he refused to rule out joining the Labour Party in the future. He vigorously opposed the Health and Social Care Bill in 2011–12. In a pamphlet, "Fatally Flawed", he demonstrated that far from the internal market, which he had championed in the 1980s, the Bill introduced an external market and he worked closely with the Labour Front Bench in the House of Lords. In March 2014, it was revealed that Owen had donated over £7,500 to the Labour Party, following the Labour leader Ed Miliband's reforms of the party's links with trade unions. No longer eligible to sit as a crossbencher, Owen now sits in the House of Lords as an "Independent Social Democrat". Owen later said he admired Miliband's "integrity" and "guts".
In the June 2017 general election, Owen made no political donation nationally although he was "pleasantly surprised that the manifesto was a lot better than expected", and praised Corbyn for showing "more flexibility in taking account of Labour MPs and party members’ views than ever Michael Foot did" in reference to the manifesto's commitments to NATO and nuclear weapons despite Corbyn's lifelong pacifism. He did, however, make a personal donation to the Labour candidate in his former constituency of Plymouth Sutton & Devonport, Luke Pollard, who successfully won the seat. 'Former SDP leader David Owen backs Corbyn's manifesto and donates to Labour' SY Briefing, 19 May 2017
However in March 2019, Owen said he would not support Labour, criticising Corbyn's leadership for its failure to "unequivocally" root out antisemitism in the Labour Party. In October 2019, Owen warned that Labour would lose potentially 5 million Leave voters who supported them due to its stance for a second Brexit referendum, and said that Labour under Corbyn and John McDonnell reminded voters of "the Labour Party of the 1980s". He also criticised McDonnell's push to change Labour's policy to a second referendum stance. In the subsequent December 2019 general election, true to Owen's warning, Labour lost 60 seats, including long time Labour seats in the red wall which supported leaving the EU.
Owen retired from the House of Lords on 13 August 2024.
Private Eye, the British satirical magazine, playfully alluded towards Owen's legendary tendency towards self-destruction. "It's a lost cause", says the bubble emanating from Major's mouth. "I'm your man", says the bubble from Owen's mouth. The Labour Shadow Foreign Minister, Jack Cunningham, greeted Major's appointment of Owen in the British House of Commons by saying that the Prime Minister's choice "was regarded as somewhat eccentric by MPs and myself – he Owen is known for many qualities, but not as a mediator. Indeed he has Balkanised a few political parties himself." Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia 2001 by Brendan Simms p137
Some believe David Owen comes across badly in Adam Le Bor's book, Milosevic: A Biography: "After he was appointed the European Community negotiator for the former Yugoslavia in 1992, Lord Owen and his wife Debbie cultivated a personal friendship with Milosevic and his wife Mira, flying in a helicopter to lunch with them in one of Tito's former palaces and offering publishing advice to Mira Milosevic". In August 1992, five months after the Bosnian war started, Owen said, "Now it is clear that Milosevic really wants peace". Milosevic: A Biography 2002 by Adam Le Bor p185
Owen became a joint author of the Vance–Owen Peace Plan (VOPP), in January 1993, which made an effort to move away from the presumption of ethnic partition.Balkan Tragedy (1995) Susan L. Woodward p304 According to America's last ambassador to Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Government were ready to accept the VOPP, but unfortunately the Clinton Administration delayed in its support, thus missing a chance to get it launched.Origins of the Catastrophe (1999) Warren Zimmermann p222 The VOPP was eventually agreed in Athens in May 1993 under intense pressure by all parties including Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić but then rejected later by the Bosnian-Serb Assembly meeting in Pale, after Karadžić insisted that the Assembly had the right to ratify the agreement. After Vance's withdrawal, Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg brokered the EU Action Plan of December 1993. They both helped the Contact Group of the US/UK/France/Germany and Russia to present its plan in the summer of 1994.
In early 1994, the European Parliament voted by 160 votes to 90, with 2 abstentions, for Owen's dismissal, but he was supported by all 15 EU Member State governments. There was a perception in America that Owen was "not fulfilling his function as an impartial negotiator". Unfinest Hour, p167 Owen, however, was consistently supported by all 15 EU Member States and the German Presidency in July 1994 urged him to remain as did the French Presidency in January 1995. Owen was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for his services in the former Yugoslavia in 1994.
In January 1995, Lord Owen wrote to François Mitterrand as President of the European Union to say that he wished to step down before the end of the French presidency. At the end of May 1995, he was succeeded by the former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt. "Had I been younger, I would probably have resigned when the Americans ditched the Vance-Owen Peace Plan". Unfinest Hour p 157–8
Owen testified as a witness of the court in the trial of Slobodan Milošević, the former president of FR Yugoslavia.
In 2009 the culmination of these efforts, the privately funded and independent "Archer Report" in which Lord Owen was heavily involved, published its findings but was thwarted because it had no power to compel witnesses as it was not a statutory public inquiry. Successive governments have refused to hold a public inquiry into the matter and continue to withhold documentation on grounds of commercial interest.
During his investigation into the matter he attempted to access his archived documents and files from his time as minister. At first he was told "they couldn't find them" and was later told they had all been destroyed;Archived at Ghostarchive and the
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Wayback Machine: the exact series of events that led to the destruction of these documents remains a mystery and continues to raise questions amongst MPs such as Alistair Burt. Lord Owen has regularly told the media that he is not a conspiracy theorist but that he does suspect there has been a cover-up carried out by the Civil Service and that this was done after prosecutions and jail sentences were brought against government officials in France.
In September 2016 at a film-screening of the documentary Bad Blood: A Cautionary Tale, he dramatically ended a 15-minute speech on the subject proclaiming: "I have failed and I feel very miserable about it".
In October 2016, the Civil Service Commission refused a request to investigate Lord Owen's destroyed documents and separately the Department of Health advised that "the Department does not have any plans to make public the identity of junior officials involved in this matter".
On 10 May 2017 he featured in an episode of BBC Panorama called "Contaminated Blood: The Search for the Truth".
On 22 September 2020, Lord Owen gave evidence to the Infected Blood Inquiry in London. As part of his testimony he said: "We should have realised how dangerous it was to rely on blood coming in from abroad from people who were given blood for money".
As chairman of New Europe, he was the co-leader of the 'No to the Euro' campaign with Business for Sterling, which ceased when the UK Government declared in 2005 that Euro membership was off the agenda following the defeat of the EU Constitution in referendums in France and the Netherlands.
He called for a referendum before Britain's ratification of the Lisbon treaty, and expressed concerns about proposals for the creation of a 'European Rapid Reaction Force'. In February 2010, he wrote a pamphlet for the Social Market Foundation thinktank entitled "EU Social Market and Social Policy". Owen supports the referendum requirements within the European Union Act 2011.
Lord Owen continued to argue for engagement, criticising David Cameron's so-called 'veto' in December 2011 and arguing instead for a formal non-eurozone grouping with the right to join or leave the eurozone. In June 2012 Lord Owen published Europe Restructured, outlining a blueprint for restructuring the EU to allow for those countries that wish to be part of a more integrated eurozone to be facilitated while those who may only want to belong to a Single Market community are enabled to do so. He stated that a referendum on the UK's relationship with the EU was inevitable.
In February 2016, he announced that he was backing the UK leaving the EU for the 2016 referendum, arguing that "There are many positive aspects to leaving the EU. ... It could be the spark we need to re-energise our nation: a challenge and an opportunity." He has supported Vote Leave and spoken at rallies against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which Owen stated would put the NHS in danger. Owen also cited his support for Brexit due to his opposition to the concept of a United States of Europe and stated that the Eurozone was “broken”, condemning how the EU treated Greece during its debt crisis.
Owen was interviewed in 2012 as part of The History of Parliament's oral history project.
Owen was the Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, from 1996 to 2009. He has written extensively on the interaction between illness and politics, with a particular emphasis on the 'hubris syndrome', a condition affecting those at the pinnacle of power. The concept has been most fully developed in a co-authored paper in Brain.David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, "Hubris Syndrome: An Acquired Personality Disorder? A study of US presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the last 100 years" Brain 2009: 132; 1407–1410 The concept of hubris syndrome has been analysed by Professor Gerald Russell.The Psychiatrist April 2011 35:140–145 Lord Owen is chairman of the Trustees of the Daedalus Trust established to promote and provide funds for the interdisciplinary study of how 'the intoxication of power' in all walks of life can affect personality and decision making.
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