Education and Early Career
Mottram was educated at King Edward VI Camp Hill School in Birmingham. He entered the central government civil service in 1968 aged 22 with a first class degree in International relations from Keele University. Most of his peers were from Oxbridge. From 1975 until 1977, he served in the Defence and Overseas Secretariat of the Cabinet Office. He was then the secretary of two study groups on the rationale for and system options for a successor to the UK's strategic nuclear deterrent which led subsequently to the decision to adopt Trident. He was then appointed private secretary to the permanent under secretary, MOD: Sir Frank Cooper. From 1982-1986, he was private secretary to a succession of Secretaries of State for Defence - John Nott, Michael Heseltine and the late George Younger. He was Heseltine's Private Secretary at the time of his resignation in 1986 over the Westland affair.
In 1985, as private secretary to Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, he was a witness for the prosecution in the trial of Clive Ponting, who was later acquitted of an offence under section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 for passing information to Labour MP Tam Dalyell about the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands war. When asked whether answers to parliamentary questions should be truthful and not deliberately ambiguous or misleading, there was a long silence before he replied: "In highly charged political matters, one person's ambiguity may be another person's truth".
From 1986 to 1989, he was the Under-secretary responsible for the defence programme, and from 1989 to 1992, the Deputy Secretary with responsibilities for UK defence policy and strategy, and defence relations with other countries at the time of the end of the Cold War.
Read more about this topic: Richard Mottram
Famous quotes containing the words education, early and/or career:
“In that reconciling of God and Mammon which Mrs. Grantly had carried on so successfully in the education of her daughter, the organ had not been required, and had become withered, if not defunct, through want of use.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)