Lord Chris Smith, The Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, will deliver this year's Edmund Lecture

Lord Smith was educated in Edinburgh and then Pembroke College, Cambridge, achieving a double first in English (and later a PhD on Wordsworth and Coleridge) and was also a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. He is currently The Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

He began his political career as a Labour Councillor for the London Borough of Islington, becoming MP for Islington South and Finsbury in 1983. In 1992 he joined the Shadow Cabinet and held a number of frontbench posts before Labour came to power in 1997. He served as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport until 2001 when he returned to the back benches, standing down from the Commons in 2005. Immediately afterwards he was made a life peer.

He chaired the Environment Agency from 2008 to 2014; from 2007 to 2017 he was also Chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority.

Lord Smith's Edmund Lecture will explore the political and societal parallels between the ancient Abbey and the modern town.

Description supplied by the event organiser.