Tony Baldry MP awarded a knighthood in Queen's Birthday Honours List

By Matthew Barrett
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Congratulations to Sir Tony Baldry, the Member of Parliament for Banbury since 1983, who has been given a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours List this year "for public and political service". 

Sir Tony was PPS to Lynda Chalker and John Wakeham from 1985 to 1990, both Leaders of the House of Commons, until he was made a junior Minister in the Department of Energy by Mrs Thatcher. When John Major became leader of the Party, Baldry became a junior Minister under Michael Heseltine at the Department for the Environment, until he moved to the Foreign Office for a year in 1994. In 1995, he was promoted to full Minister status at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, where he stayed until 1997. In 2010, Sir Tony was appointed Second Church Estates Commissioner - which means he answers questions in the Commons on behalf of the Church Commissioners.

Other Tory figures receiving honours included Mary Archer, wife of Jeffrey, who was made a Dame for her work for the NHS, and Jeremy Middleton, former the Chairman of the Conservative National Convention was made a CBE "for political and charitable services". I also noticed Harry Beckhough - the 96 year old activist who David Cameron singled out at the 2010 Party conference - is honoured with an MBE.

Other politicians to have been honoured in the Birthday Honours List include Malcolm Bruce, the Lib Dem MP for Gordon, Tony Cunningham, the Labour MP for Workington, George Reid, the SNP former Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, who were all given knighthoods, and Tessa Jowell, the former Labour Minister, who was made a Dame.

The full (pdf) list of honours is here. If there are any Tory politicians I've missed, let us know in the comments.