SPEAKER: LORD ROBERTSON

Lord Robertson is Deputy Chairman of Cable and Wireless plc. He was Secretary General of NATO from 1999-2003 and Defence Secretary of the United Kingdom from 1997-1999. He was Member of Parliament for Hamilton and the Hamilton South Constituencies from 1978-1999.

From 1969-1978 he was Scottish Organiser with the GMB trade union responsible for the Scottish Whisky industry. In 1978 he was elected to parliament for the Hamilton constituency in Lanarkshire . He was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Social Services Secretary in 1979 and from 1979-1993 he held senior opposition roles including 11 years on Foreign Affairs and in particular Europe. In 1993 he was elected to the Shadow Cabinet and served as Principal opposition spokesman on Scottish Affairs.

He was Chairman of the Scottish Labour Party in 1977 and served on the Board of the Scottish Development Agency and was a governor of the Scottish Police College.

After the 1997 General Election he was appointed Defence Secretary by Prime Minister Blair and was responsible for carrying through the Strategic Defence Review and for leading the military campaign in Iraq in 1998 and Kosovo in 1999.

In October 1999 he was appointed 10th Secretary General of NATO and elevated to the House of Lords. His time at NATO coincided with the 11 September attacks on the US, the first invoking of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the crisis in Macedonia, the creation of the NATO/Russian Council and NATO’s assumption of the stablisation role in Afghanistan. He chaired the NATO Summit in Prague in 2002, which invited seven new countries into the Alliance.

Lord Robertson was appointed to Her Majesty’s Privy Council in 1997, appointed by the Queen as a Knight of the Thistle (KT) and awarded the GCMG (Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George) in 2004. He received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2003 from President George W Bush. He has been awarded the highest national honours from Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, Belgium, Hungary, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia and Estonia. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (hon FRSE) in February 2003 and has honorary doctorates from Dundee, St Andrews, Bradford, Cranfield and Glasgow Caledonian Universities as well as from Baku State University, Azerbaijan and The French University, Armenia.

He is a Non Executive Director of the Weir Group plc and the Smiths Group plc, a Strategic Advisor to the Royal Bank of Canada Europe, BP plc and on the Advisory Board of Englefield Capital and is Senior Counsel to the Cohen Group (USA). He is joint President of the Royal Institute of Institutional Affairs, an Elder Brother of Trinity House, is Chairman of the John Smith Memorial Trust and Honorary Regimental Colonel of the London Scottish (Volunteers).