Geoffrey William Hoon (born 6 December 1953) is a British former politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire from 1992 to 2010 for the Labour Party. He is a former Defence Secretary, Transport Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons and Government Chief Whip.
He had previously been a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Derbyshire from 1984 to 1994.
His mother June attended the Homelands School in Derby, in the 1940s, and his father attended the Central School for Boys, in Derby. His father lived on Howard Street in Derby, in the 1940s.
Hoon was born in Derby, England, and is the son of railwayman Ernest Hoon and June Collett. His parents were Methodists, and he attended the New Sawley Methodist church.
He was privately educated at Nottingham High School, an independent school. He gained seven O levels in 1970. He competed in the 400m hurdles, running 65.2 seconds, at school. In November 1971 he was awarded the Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award. In August 1972 he received grade B in English, grade A in History, and grade A in Economics. He worked in a local furniture factory before going to university. He then read law at Jesus College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1976. He was a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Leeds from 1976 to 1982 and was a sub-warden at Devonshire Hall. He was called to the bar at Gray's Inn in 1978, and was also a visiting Law Professor at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, from 1979 to 1980. In 1982, Hoon became a practising barrister in Nottingham.
Member of the European Parliament
At a Labour party meeting in Matlock on Saturday 10 December 1983, he was chosen as the Labour candidate for the 1984 European Parliament elections. He had previously not been in favour of the EEC and had campaigned against it in the 1975 referendum. In 1983, he thought that EEC spending was put in the wrong places, and he wanted a change to the EEC's common agricultural policy, where he felt that much food went to waste and that it resulted in some products in the supermarket costing too much.
Hoon was elected as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Derbyshire (European Parliament constituency) in 1984, defeating the Conservative incumbent Tom Spencer, and served in Brussels and Strasbourg for ten years. In 1988, he drafted a report for the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs in favour of prohibiting dual membership of the European Parliament and national parliaments, subsequently approved by the Parliament and enacted as of the 2004 European elections. Ironically, Hoon himself became a dual-mandate member for two years, after being elected to the House of Commons in 1992 and only standing down from the European Parliament at the 1994 elections.
Hoon was elected to the House of Commons at the 1992 general election for Ashfield, making his maiden speech on 20 May 1992, following the retirement of the sitting Labour MP, Frank Haynes. He held the seat with a majority of 12,987 and remained as the MP until the 2010 general election.
Towards the end of his political career, Hoon acquired the irreverent nickname Buff (Buffoon) as the result of a joke told by fellow Labour Party colleague Peter Kilfoyle.
Shadow Cabinet and early government posts
In Parliament, Hoon was promoted by Tony Blair in 1994 when he was appointed as an opposition whip, and in 1995 he joined the frontbench team as a spokesman on Trade and Industry. Following the 1997 general election he became a member of the government of Tony Blair as the Parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Lord Chancellor's Department, being promoted to the rank of Minister of State in the same department in 1998.
In 1999, Hoon was briefly a minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with responsibility for Asia, the Pacific, Middle East and North Africa. He entered the cabinet later in the year as the Secretary of State for Defence, at which time he became a member of the Privy Council. He served as the Lord Privy Seal and the Leader of the House of Commons from the 2005 general election until 5 May 2006, when he was appointed as Minister for Europe.
Secretary of State for Defence
On 11 October 1999 Hoon was appointed Secretary of State for Defence. His term took him through the 2000 British military intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War and the NATO intervention in the 2001 insurgency in the Republic of Macedonia. The rest of his term was dominated by the start of the war on terror in 2001, including British participation in both the War in Afghanistan, Operation Herrick, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Operation Telic.
Asserting the importance of deterrence, in a 2003 interview on the BBC's Breakfast with Frost, Hoon asserted that the UK was willing to use nuclear weapons against Iraqi forces "in the right circumstances, namely in extreme self defence."
On 23 June 2003, Hoon, following a detailed briefing given to the United Nations by US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, continued to claim that two trailers found in Iraq were mobile weapons laboratories. This was in spite of the fact that it had been leaked to the press by David Kelly and other weapons inspectors that they were nothing of the sort. The trailers were for filling hydrogen balloons for artillery ranging and were sold to Iraq by a British company, Marconi.
In an April 2004 interview, Hoon said that more could have been done to help Kelly, who committed suicide on 17 July 2003 after being named as the source of Andrew Gilligan's disputed Today programme contribution.