Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
British politician (born 1953)

Sir Geoffrey Robert Clifton-Brown (born 23 March 1953) is a British Conservative Party politician who has served as a Member of Parliament (MP) since 1992. He has represented North Cotswolds since the 2024 general election, having previously represented Cirencester and Tewkesbury, then The Cotswolds.
Early life and career
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown was born on 23 March 1953 in Cambridge, the eldest of four children of farmer Robert Lawrence Clifton-Brown (1929–2016), of Maltings Farmhouse, Haverhill, Suffolk, a councillor and mayor of St Edmundsbury, Suffolk, and (Florence) Elizabeth Lindsay (1926–2006), granddaughter of Sir Edmund Hoyle Vestey, 1st Baronet. Clifton-Brown is therefore distantly related to the actor Tom Hiddleston, who is Edmund Vestey's great-great-grandson.
He was privately educated, first at Tormore School in Deal, Kent, and then at Eton College. He then studied at the Royal Agricultural College where he qualified as a chartered surveyor in 1975. He began his career as a graduate estate surveyor at the Property Services Agency in Dorchester and, later in 1975, became an investment surveyor with Jones Lang Wootton. He became the vice chairman of the Norfolk North Conservative Association in 1984. He was elected as Constituency Chairman in 1986, a position he held until he resigned in 1991 in order to stand for election as a Conservative candidate.
Parliamentary career
During 1991, Clifton-Brown was selected as the candidate for the then Conservative parliamentary constituency of Cirencester and Tewkesbury, following the retirement of the former Cabinet minister Nicholas Ridley.
The public source identifies “Geoffrey Clifton-Brown” as british politician (born 1953). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Geoffrey, Clifton-Brown and British.
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This entry incorporates text from “Geoffrey Clifton-Brown” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.