David Howell - The Right Honorable Lord Howell of Guildford - is a former Secretary of State for Energy and for Transport in the UK Government and an economist and journalist. In the sixties he acted as policy adviser to Edward Heath and was Director of the Conservative Political Centre. In the late seventies he became head of Margaret Thatcher's speech-writing team. He served as Minister of State in Northern Ireland, under William Whitelaw, from 1972 to 1974, at the height of the troubles. Until 2002 he was Chairman of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, (the high level bilateral forum between leading UK and Japanese politicians, industrialists and academics), which was first set up by Margaret Thatcher and Yasuhiro Nakasone in 1984. In addition he writes a fortnightly column for The JAPAN TIMES in Tokyo, and has done so since 1985.