About David Owen
David Anthony Llewellyn Owen, Baron Owen, (born 2 July 1938) is a British politician and physician. He served as Foreign Secretary in the Labour government of James Callaghan from 1977 to 1979, becoming the youngest person appointed to the position since 1935, and later led the Social Democratic Party (SDP). He was a Member of Parliament for 26 years, from 1966 to 1992. 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 Communities; 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 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 the February 1974 general election Owen became Labour MP for the adjacent Plymouth Devonport constituency, winning it from the Conservative incumbent Dame Joan Vickers by a slim margin (437 votes).
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