Sir Adam Nicholas Ridley (born 14 May 1942) is a British economist, civil servant, and banker. After working at the Foreign Office and the Department of Economic Affairs, he was Director of the Conservative Research Department. With Chris Patten he wrote the Conservative election manifesto of 1979 and after the election was a Special Advisor to the Chancellors of the Exchequer until 1984. He later served as a director of Hambros Bank, of Morgan Stanley, and of Equitas insurance companies. Early life and background The son of Jasper Maurice Alexander Ridley (1913–1943), by his marriage to Helen Laura Cressida Bonham-Carter, a daughter of Sir Maurice Bonham-Carter and Violet Asquith (herself a daughter of the British prime minister H. H. Asquith), Ridley lost his father during the Second World War. His grandfather, Sir Jasper Nicholas Ridley (1887–1951), was the younger son of Matthew White Ridley, 1st Viscount Ridley, Home Secretary in Lord Salisbury's government from 1895 to 1900, while his paternal grandmother was Nathalie von Benckendorff, a daughter of Count Alexander Benckendorff, Russian Ambassador to the Court of St James's between 1903 and 1917. Ridley was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took first class honours in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 1965. He is a first cousin of the actress Helena Bonham Carter and a more distant cousin of the Conservative cabinet minister Nicholas Ridley and the historian Jane Ridley. Career After joining the Foreign Office in 1965, Ridley was quickly seconded to the recently established Department of Economic Affairs, where he remained until 1968. He was a Harkness Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, for the academic year 1968–1969, then returned to the Civil Service. He was with HM Treasury from 1970 to 1971, then joined Edward Heath new Central Policy Review Staff (or "Think Tank") and remained there until the change of government in 1974. He then served for five years as Economic Adviser to the Conservative Shadow Cabinets of Heath and Margaret Thatcher. In 1975, when Thatcher wrested the party leadership from Heath, Ridley was part of her inner circle, and in his book A View from the Wings Ronald Millar recalls working into the small hours with Ridley and Chris Patten on Thatcher's first speech as leader to a Conservative Party conference. In the summer of 1978, in the expectation of a general election later that year, a Conservative Party election manifesto