Parris, Matthew

Matthew Francis Parris (born 7 August 1949) is a British political writer, broadcaster, and former politician. He served as Member of Parliament for West Derbyshire from 1979 to 1986. Ideologically a liberal conservative, he is a member of the Conservative Party. Parris was born in South Africa to British parents. He subsequently studied at Clare College, Cambridge, and Yale University before working for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and then the Conservative Research Department. He entered parliament in 1979 and remained there until 1986, resigning to pursue a journalistic career as presenter of the television series Weekend World. After the series ended in 1988, he became a freelance columnist for The Times. Having spoken out for gay rights throughout the 1980s, in 1989 he was a founding member of the gay rights charity Stonewall. During the 1990s, Parris' columns began being collected together for book publication and in 2002 he published his autobiography. His political column proved influential, described as being widely regarded as essential reading among the political class in Westminster. By the 2010s and 2020s he was more openly critical of some of the groups he had been affiliated with, criticising Conservative leaders Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as well as Stonewall's move to include trans rights in its remit. In 2024, he ended his Saturday political column in The Times.