Raymond Asquith, 3rd Earl of Oxford and Asquith
British former diplomat and hereditary peer
Raymond Benedict Bartholomew Michael Asquith, 3rd Earl of Oxford and Asquith (born 24 August 1952) is a British former diplomat and hereditary peer, styled Viscount Asquith until he succeeded to his father's peerage titles on 16 January 2011. The earldom of Oxford and Asquith was created for his paternal great-grandfather, H. H. Asquith, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Early life
Lord Oxford (as he is now known) is the elder son of Julian Asquith, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, and code breaker Anne Asquith. He was named after his paternal grandfather Raymond Asquith, a scholar and Army officer who was killed in action during the First World War. He was born in Libya, where his father was posted in 1952. His father also had postings to Zanzibar, the West Indies, and the Seychelles. He was sent to school in England when he was nine years old.
He was educated at Farleigh School and Ampleforth College, and obtained a BA and subsequent MA degree at Balliol College, Oxford.
Career
Raymond Asquith applied to join HM Diplomatic Service as a career diplomat in 1978 but was offered a job in the Secret Intelligence Service instead in 1980. As well as postings in London at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and to the Cabinet Office, he served as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow from 1983 to 1985, and Counsellor at HM Embassy in Kyiv from 1992 to 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Raymond Asquith, 3rd Earl of Oxford and Asquith” 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.