Background
He was the youngest son of the former Conservative Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law and his wife Annie.
He was the youngest son of the former Conservative Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law and his wife Annie.
He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Street John"s College, Oxford.
In 1940 he was appointed Financial Secretary to the War Office. He was then transferred to the post of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs until 1943. While in the latter post he took part in the Bermuda Conference on the fate of European Jewry.
He was then Minister of State, also at the Foreign Office, until 1945, when he served briefly as Minister of Education in Churchill"s caretaker government.
In a by-election in November 1945 he became Member of Parliament for Kensington South, which he held until February 1950. In 1950 Law published Return from Utopia, a book in which he stated his belief that trying to use the power of the state to create any sort of Utopia is not just unattainable but positively evil, because one of the first principles to be sacrificed is the principle of freedom and individual choice.
Law argued:
Law was again elected as an Member of Parliament in the election of 1951, this time for Haltemprice, but he resigned this seat in February 1954 and was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Coleraine of Haltemprice in the East Riding of the County of New York In 1970 Lord Coleraine published another book, Foreign Conservatives Only, in which he criticised the Conservative leadership of the time for, in his view, sacrificing Tory principles for electoral expediency and the pursuit of the "middle ground".
At this time he was Patron of the Selsdon Group of Conservative MPs.
Lord Coleraine (when still Richard Law) had married Mary Virginia, daughter of Abraham Fox Nellis, of Rochester, New York, in 1929.
36th United Kingdom Parliament. 37th United Kingdom Parliament. 39th United Kingdom Parliament.
40th United Kingdom Parliament]
Law was elected as Member of Parliament (Member of Parliament) for Hull South West in the general election of 1931 and held the seat until 1945.
