Hoon, Geoff(rey) William (1953– )

British Labour politician, parliamentary secretary to the Treasury and governemnt chief whip from 2007. One of a clutch of barristers in the ‘New Labour’ Blair administration from 1997, as defence secretary 1999–2005 he organized the British contributions to the US-led military operations in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. He survived questioning in 2003 by the Hutton inquiry, set up to investigate the death of Dr David Kelly, a defence department expert on Iraq's arms programmes. Hutton reported in 2004 that there had been no underhand strategy by the Ministry of Defence to name Dr Kelly as the source for a newspaper journalist's article concerning the Blair government's alleged overstatement of evidence concerning the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But Hoon's reputation was tarnished by the inquiry's hearings. His appointments in 2005 as Leader of the Commons and then from 2006 as minister for Europe were effectively a demotion.

Born in Derby, England, the son of a railwayman, he attended school in Nottingham and studied law at Cambridge University. He worked as a law lecturer at Leeds University 1976–82 and practised as a barrister in Nottingham 1982–84. He was elected to the European Parliament in 1984, representing Derbyshire until 1994, and became MP for Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, in April 1992. When Labour came to power in 1997 he was made a parliamentary secretary in the Lord Chancellor's Department, becoming a minister in 1998; during 1999 he was briefly a Foreign Office minister.