We can today reveal that the celebrity host for the 2013 Building Better Healthcare Awards will be the Right Honourable Michael Portillo.
Michael was born in North London in 1953. His father, Luis, had come to Britain as a refugee at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and his mother, Cora, was brought up in Fife, Scotland. She met Luis while she was an undergraduate at Oxford.
Michael attended a grammar school, Harrow County, and went to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he gained a first class degree in History.
He left Cambridge in 1975, and for a year worked for a shipping company. He moved to the Conservative Research Department in 1976, where he spent three years. At the General Election in 1979 he was responsible for briefing Margaret Thatcher before her press conferences. For the next two years he was special adviser to the Secretary of State for Energy.
He worked for Kerr McGee Oil (UK) Ltd from 1981-1983 and contested the Birmingham Perry Bar seat at the 1983 Election.
In 1982 Michael married Carolyn. They had first met when they were at school. Carolyn had become a chartered accountant and for the last 15 years has been a ‘headhunter’ with Spencer Stuart Associates.
Michael returned to politics as a special adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Nigel Lawson) and in December 1984 won the by-election in Enfield Southgate, caused by the murder of Sir Anthony Berry MP in the Brighton bombing. Michael represented the seat for 13 years, but was defeated in the 1997 Election.
He joined the Government in 1986, and remained a member until 1997. He was a whip, Parliamentary Under Secretary for Social Security, Minister of State for Transport, Minister of State for Local Government and Inner Cities; and as a Cabinet Minister was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Secretary of State for Employment, and Secretary of State for Defence. He was admitted to the Privy Council in 1992.
After his 1997 electoral defeat, Michael returned to Kerr McGee as an adviser. He also turned to journalism, writing a weekly column about walking as a pilgrim on the Santiago Way, and working as a hospital porter. He also fronted a three-part series for Channel 4 about politics, Portillo’s Progress, and a programme in BBC2’s Great Railway Journeys series, which was partly a biography of his late father, and radio programmes on Wagner and the Spanish Civil War.
Michael was re-elected to Parliament in a by-election in Kensington and Chelsea in November 1999 and was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from February 2000 to September 2001. Following the Conservatives’ election defeat in 2001, Michael unsuccessfully contested the leadership of the party. In 2005 he left the House of Commons.
Since then he has made a number of television programmes for BBC2 including Art That Shook The World: Richard Wagner’s Ring , Portillo in Euroland,
Elizabeth I in the series Great Britons, When Michael Portillo Became A Single Mum, Portillo Goes Wild in Spain (a natural history programme), and The Science of Killing. There followed documentaries on the unburied bodies from the Spanish Civil War and on Guantanamo Bay. In 2010 BBC Radio 4 carried his 3-part series Democracy on Trial and for BBC4 he has made several series of Dinner with Portillo, a discussion programme, and in 2008 The Lady’s Not For Spurning, about Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. Since 2006 he has been on The Moral Maze team on BBC Radio 4 and in 2003 he began the weekly political discussion programme, This Week on BBC1 with fellow presenters Andrew Neil and Diane Abbott MP. He has made 100 programmes in the series Great British Railway Journeys and Great Continental Railway Journeys for BBC2 and for six years he was a weekly columnist for The Sunday Times and was the theatre critic of The New Statesman between 2004 and 2006.
He will front the awards ceremony at The Brewery in central London on 6 November, where he will read out the names of all the finalists and winners in all the categories. To book your place at the event, contact Stephen Fontana by email at stephenf@hpcimedia.com or call 020 7193 1641; or Ali Badr alib@hpcimedia.com or call 020 7193 6654.