Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley (born 7 February 1958[3][2]), commonly known as Matt Ridley, is a British science writer, journalist and businessman. He writes on science, the environment and economics,[4] and has been a regular contributor to The Times newspaper. Ridley was chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, during which period it experienced the first run on a British bank in 130 years. He resigned, and the bank was bailed out by the UK government; this led to its nationalisation.[5]
Ridley is a libertarian,[6] and a supporter of Brexit.[7] He inherited the viscountcy in February 2012 and was a Conservative hereditary peer from February 2013, with an elected seat in the House of Lords,[8][9] until his retirement in December 2021.[10]
Early life and education
Ridley's parents were Matthew White Ridley, 4th Viscount Ridley (1925–2012), and Lady Anne Katharine Gabrielle Lumley (1928–2006), the daughter of Roger Lumley, 11th Earl of Scarbrough.[11] He is the nephew of the late Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) and minister Nicholas Ridley[12] and the great grandson of Edwin Lutyens.[11]
Ridley attended Eton College from 1970 to 1975, and then studied at Magdalen College, Oxford,[3] earning a BA degree with first class honours in zoology.[13] He then pursued doctoral research on the mating system of the
Career
Journalism
Ridley joined The Economist in 1984, first working as a science editor until 1987, then as Washington, D.C., correspondent from 1987 to 1989 and as American editor from 1990 to 1992.[15][13] He was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph and an editor of The Best American Science Writing 2002.[16]
From 2010 to 2013, Ridley wrote the weekly "Mind and Matter" column for The Wall Street Journal, which "explores the science of human nature and its implications".[17]
Since 2013, Ridley has written a weekly column for
Patronage
The Banks Group and Blagdon estate developed and sponsored the construction of Northumberlandia, or the Lady of the North, a land sculpture in the shape of a reclining female figure, which was part-commissioned and sponsored by Ridley.[29] Now run by a charity group called the Land Trust,[30] it is the largest landform in the world depicting the human form, and, through private funding, cost £3m to build.[31] Attracting over 100,000 people per year, the Northumberland art project, tourism and cultural landmark has won a global landscape architecture award, and has been named 'Miss World'.[32]
The Royal Agricultural Society of England awarded the Bledisloe Gold Medal in 2015 to Ridley for the work done on his Blagdon estate, saying that it "wanted to highlight the extensive environmental improvement work that has been undertaken across the land".[33]
Publications
Ridley has written a number of popular science books, listed below.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, 1993
The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, 1996
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, 1999
Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, 2003 (also later released under the title The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture in 2004)
The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture, 2004
Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, 2006
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, 2010
Political and scientific views
Role of government regulation
In a 2006 edition of the online magazine Edge – the third culture, Ridley wrote a response to the question "What's your dangerous idea?" which was entitled "Government is the problem not the solution",[54] in which he describes his attitude to government regulation: "In every age and at every time there have been people who say we need more regulation, more government. Sometimes, they say we need it to protect exchange from corruption, to set the standards and police the rules, in which case they have a point, though often they exaggerate it ... The dangerous idea we all need to learn is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be."
In 2007, the environmentalist George Monbiot wrote an article in The Guardian connecting Ridley's libertarian economic philosophy and the £27 billion failure of Northern Rock.[6] On 1 June 2010 Monbiot followed up his previous article in the context of Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist, which had just been published. Monbiot took the view that Ridley had failed to learn from the collapse of Northern Rock.[55]
Honours, awards and titles
In 1996, he was a visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York,[16] and in 2006 was awarded an honorary DSc degree.[76]
In 2003, he received an honorary DSc degree from Buckingham University[77] and in 2007, an honorary DCL degree from Newcastle University.[78]
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1999.[79] In 2004, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) for "major contributions to public engagement with the biological sciences".[2]
Personal life
When his father died in 2012, Ridley succeeded him as the 5th Viscount Ridley, having taken over the running of the family estate of Blagdon Hall, near Stannington, Northumberland, some years before.
In 1989, Ridley married Anya Hurlbert, a Professor of Neuroscience at Newcastle University; they live in northern England and have a son and a daughter.[3][13]
In 1980, his sister Rose married the British Conservative Party politician Owen Paterson, who held the posts of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs until July 2014.[89] During this time Ridley was described as 'in many ways Paterson's personal think tank'.[90]
In 2015, Ridley's team won the celebrity Christmas special
External links
- Personal webpage
- Matt Ridley's blog
- The Viscount Ridley on parliament.uk
- Treasury – Minutes of Evidence: Examination of Witnesses: Dr Matt Ridley, Chairman, Northern Rock
- Ridley interviewed for Massive Change Radio in January 2004
- Biography page on Edge.org
- Matt Ridley, "We've never had it so good – and it's all thanks to science
References
- Northumberland Lord-Lieutenant Northumberland County Council, retrieved 2016-08-10^
- Dr Matthew Ridley FMedSci Academy of Medical Sciences, 2004^
- {{Who's Who |title=Ridley, 5th Viscount |id=U59818 |volume=2007 |edition=online [[Oxford University Press]]}}^