Lord Owen is a doctor by training and was neurology and psychiatric registrar at St Thomas’s Hospital, London.  He then entered politics and in Labour Governments served as Navy Minister, Health Minister and Foreign Secretary. He co-founded the Social Democratic Party and was its leader from 1983-1987 and 1988-1990.  From 1992-1995 he served as EU peace negotiator in the former Yugoslavia. From 1992 he sat as an independent social democrat in the House of Lords until he voluntarily retired in 2024. He fully retired from business in 2015 having had interests in America, Russia and the UK.

Lord Owen has long been interested in the inter-relationship between politics and medicine and has written extensively on the subject including In Sickness and In Power: Illness in Heads of Government, military and business since 1900 (revised 2016) and Hubris. The Road to Donald Trump Power, Populism, Narcissism (paperback, 2020).  He served as Chairman of the Daedalus Trust charity from 2011-2017, which promoted multidisciplinary research into personality changes associated with the exercise of power in all walks of life.

His last book, Riddle, Mystery and Enigma. Two Hundred Years of British-Russian Relations, was published in 2021 with an updated edition in 2022 to take account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.