Geoff Hoon

Geoffrey William Hoon (born 6 December 1953) is a British Labour Party politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire from 1992 to 2010.

He is a former Defence Secretary, Transport Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons and Government Chief Whip.

He then read law at Jesus College, Cambridge from which he graduated in 1976.

He was a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Leeds from 1976 to 1982 and was a sub-warden at Devonshire Hall.

He was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn in 1978, and was also a visiting Law Professor at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, from 1979 to 1980.

In 1982, Hoon became a practising barrister in Nottingham.

He had previously been a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Derbyshire from 1984 to 1994.

Hoon was born in Derby, England, and is the son of railwayman Ernest Hoon and June Collett.

He was educated at Nottingham High School, an independent school.

Hoon was elected as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Derbyshire in 1984 and served in Brussels and Strasbourg for ten years.

In 1988, he drafted a report for the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs in favour of prohibiting dual membership of the European Parliament and national parliaments, subsequently approved by the Parliament and enacted as of the 2004 European elections.

The Upholder class entered Royal Navy service from 1990 to 1993 at the end of the Cold War, and were deemed surplus as part of the Peace Dividend and refocus on a nuclear submarine fleet.

They were placed into storage until Canada purchased them.

Ironically, Hoon himself became a dual-mandate member for two years, after being elected to the House of Commons in 1992 and only standing down from the European Parliament at the 1994 elections.

He was elected to the House of Commons at the 1992 general election for Ashfield, making his maiden speech on 20 May 1992, following the retirement of the sitting Labour MP, Frank Haynes.

In Parliament, Hoon was promoted by Tony Blair in 1994 when he was appointed as an opposition whip, and in 1995 he joined the frontbench team as a spokesman on Trade and Industry.

Following the 1997 general election he became a member of the government of Tony Blair as the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Lord Chancellor's Department, being promoted to the rank of Minister of State in the same department in 1998.

In 1998, Canada purchased four Upholder-class submarines and a suite of trainers from the Royal Navy to replace their decommissioned Oberon-class submarines.

In 1999, Hoon was briefly a minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with responsibility for Asia, the Pacific, Middle East and North Africa.

He entered the cabinet later in the year as the Secretary of State for Defence, at which time he became a member of the Privy Council.

On 11 October 1999 Hoon was appointed Secretary of State for Defence.

His term took him through the 2000 British military intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War and the NATO intervention in the 2001 insurgency in the Republic of Macedonia.

The rest of his term was dominated by the start of the War on Terror in 2001, including British participation in both the War in Afghanistan, Operation Herrick, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Operation Telic.

Asserting the importance of deterrence, in a 2003 interview on the BBC's Breakfast with Frost, Hoon asserted that the UK was willing to use nuclear weapons against Iraqi forces "in the right circumstances, namely in extreme self defence."

On 23 June 2003, Hoon, following a detailed briefing given to the United Nations by US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, continued to claim that two trailers found in Iraq were mobile weapons laboratories.

This was in spite of the fact that it had been leaked to the press by David Kelly and other weapons inspectors that they were nothing of the sort.

The trailers were for filling hydrogen balloons for artillery ranging and were sold to Iraq by a British company, Marconi.

In an April 2004 interview, Hoon said that more could have been done to help Kelly, who committed suicide on 17 July 2003 after being named as the source of Andrew Gilligan's disputed Today programme contribution.

Shortly after the US/UK led invasion of Iraq began in 2003, following an admission by the Ministry of Defence that Britain had dropped 50 airborne cluster bombs in the south of Iraq and left behind up to 800 unexploded bomblets, it was put to Hoon in a Radio 4 interview that an Iraqi mother of a child killed by these cluster bombs would not thank the British Army.

He replied "One day they might."

Hoon continued, "I accept that in the short term the consequences are terrible. No one minimises those and I'm not seeking to do so," he said.

"But what I am saying is that this is a country that has been brutalised for decades by this appalling regime and that the restoration of that country to its own people, the possibility of their deciding for themselves their future ... and indeed the way in which they go about their lives, ultimately, yes, that will be a better place for people in Iraq."

On 5 October 2004 HMCS Chicoutimi, sailing from Faslane Naval Base to Nova Scotia, declared an emergency northwest of Ireland following a fire on board.

The fire was caused by seawater entering through open hatches in rough seas; an inquiry established later that this was an "incorrect operating procedure".

It soaked electrical insulation (which had not been sufficiently waterproofed since it conformed to an older specification than the three other submarines), starting a fire.

The Chicoutimi lost power and wallowed in the seas NW of Ireland.

He served as the Lord Privy Seal and the Leader of the House of Commons from the 2005 general election until 5 May 2006, when he was appointed as Minister for Europe.

He held the seat with a majority of 12,987 and remained as the MP until the 2010 general election.

Towards the end of his political career, Hoon acquired the irreverent nickname Buff (Buffoon) as the result of a joke told by fellow Labour Party colleague Peter Kilfoyle.

Hoon gave evidence about the Iraq war both to the 2003 Hutton Inquiry during his term, and later on 19 January 2010 gave evidence to the Iraq Inquiry about his time as Defence Secretary.