Background
Barry Gardiner, the son of a surgeon and an international footballer, was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He was educated at the (now independent but then local authority) High School of Glasgow and the independent Haileybury and Imperial Service College in Hertford before attending the University of St Andrews where he received an MA. He then served for two years as full-time Scottish Regional Secretary of the Student Christian Movement. In 1983, he was awarded a Kennedy Memorial Trust scholarship to study Philosophy at Harvard University under John Rawls, returning to research at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge for three years from 1984. He worked as a senior partner in shipping insurance and arbitration for ten years before his election to parliament.
He was elected as a councillor to Cambridge City Council in 1988 becoming the mayor of the city in 1992, the youngest mayor in the city's 800 year history. He left the council in 1994.
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“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
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