The most recent contest was held last month when the Conservative peer Earl Ferrers died. He was a popular figure in the Lords, whose most notable contribution might have been his unwitting acceptance of an amendment in 1988 that allowed pubs to open on Sunday lunchtimes (he forgot to shout ‘not content’). One of the early favourites to succeed Ferrers was Viscount Hailsham, né Douglas Hogg, who retired from the Commons at the last election, having received some adverse publicity for his moat-related expenses claims. Hogg failed to gain the necessary majority of the 47 Conservative peers. The victor was Viscount Ridley, better known to some as the popular science writer and climate change sceptic Matt Ridley. He deserves to be better known still for his chairmanship of Northern Rock in the period leading up to its implosion in 2007. A zoologist by training, he had followed in the footsteps of his father, who chaired the bank in the 1990s. The Treasury Select Committee’s report into the bank’s demise found that Ridley lacked ‘relevant financial qualifications’ and failed to provide against the risks of the ‘reckless business strategy’ pursued by the bank’s executives.

Ridley’s latest bestseller, a paean to the free market called The Rational Optimist, is described by its publishers as ‘a counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age’. It’s no wonder he feels chipper, but his charmed rise to a seat for life is unlikely to cheer the rest of us up.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n05/michael-grayshott/short-cuts

Tall, fiercely intellectual and sometimes stand-offish, Ridley is a DPhil in zoology and wrote his Oxford University doctorate on the mating habits of pheasants. His father, the fourth Viscount Ridley, was also chairman of Northern from 1987 to 1992, and sat on the board for 30 years.

The chairman's job now pays £300,000 a year and it is safe to say that the present incumbent has never needed one of its home loans. He lives in Blagdon Hall, the Grade I listed family seat near Newcastle which dates back to 1735.

Ridley was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, and became science editor and later American editor at the Economist before writing a science column for the Daily Telegraph. He joined the board at Northern Rock in 1994 and was appointed chairman in 2004.
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One of his ancestors was the city's mayor four times in the 18th century and his uncle was the late Nicholas Ridley, the former Conservative cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-1614129/Northern-Rock-bosses-A-board-profile.html