John Russell, 7th Earl Russell

John Francis Russell, 7th Earl Russell (born 19 November 1971), is a British politician who has sat in the House of Lords since 2023 as a member of the Liberal Democrats. A hereditary peer, Russell was made a life peer as Baron Russell of Forest Hill in 2026. A photographer by trade, he served as a councillor on Lewisham Borough Council (20062010) prior to entering the House of Lords.

Early life The younger son of Conrad Russell, 5th Earl Russell, a professor of history at Yale University, and his wife Elizabeth Franklin Sanders, Russell is also a grandson of the philosopher Bertrand Russell and a great-great-grandson of John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, a Liberal Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was educated at the William Ellis School, Highgate.

As a teenager, he took adventure training holidays at Ty'n y Berth, a Wide Horizons centre in Wales, and he later became an advocate of providing disadvantaged children with such opportunities.

Russell became chairman of the Lewisham Liberal Democrats and was elected to serve as a Liberal Democrat councillor for Forest Hill on Lewisham Borough Council at the 2006 Lewisham London Borough Council election, going on to chair the council's Overview and Scrutiny committee. He subsequently lost his seat in 2010.

In 2006, Russell joined the board of Wide Horizons and chaired it from 2012. It went into administration and ceased trading in 2018.

On 17 August 2014, on the death of his older brother Nicholas Russell, 6th Earl Russell, Russell succeeded as Earl Russell and Viscount Amberley, both in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. At the 2022 Lewisham London Borough Council election, he again stood for election in the Forest Hill ward, and was unsuccessful, finishing eighth.

In June 2023, Russell entered the House of Lords after winning a whole house by-election to fill a vacancy among the excepted hereditary peers. As part of the 2025 Political Peerages and ahead of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 coming into effect, he was created a life peer, as Baron Russell of Forest Hill, of Forest Hill in the London Borough of Lewisham on 30 March 2026.

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