Biography

Alan Duncan Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

Personal profile PDF.

"Duncan, whose height (he claims 5ft 6in, but he is exaggerating) and style have prompted sobriquets like 'the Bonsai Heseltine'" Paul Routledge, Independent.

"People sometimes say that the all-knowing Almighty, seeing how small some of His creatures are to be, has made them boisterous to compensate. But I think that seeing how boisterous Mr Duncan was going to be, the Almighty made him small, to limit the damage. Matthew Parris, The Times.

Alan's Life

He was born in 1957, and was educated at Beechwood Park School, Herts, Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood, St John's College, Oxford and as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University, USA. He was President of the Oxford Union in 1979 and, from 1979-84, was active in the Battersea Conservative Association.

He worked for Shell International Petroleum, and subsequently for an independent commodity company as a trader of crude oil and refined products. He lived in Singapore from 1984-86 and has travelled extensively, especially in the Middle East and South-East Asia.