Mark Carlisle, Baron Carlisle of Bucklow PC QC (b July 7 1929) is a Conservative British politician and was MP for Runcorn 1964-1983 and Warrington South 1983-1987. Created a life peer in November 1987, he had been Secretary of State for Education and Science from 1979 until 1981.

He was educated at Radley College in Abingdon, Oxfordshire and the University of Manchester before becoming an MP in 1964 for the Cheshire constituency of Runcorn. He was an Under-Secretary to the Home Office from 1970-1972 when he became a Minister of State at the same department leaving the job when the Conservatives went out of office in 1974. He was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Science in 1978 before being appointed to the department itself when Margaret Thatcher was elected in May 1979.

Thatcher writes in her memoirs that Carlisle ‘had not proved a particularly effective Education Secretary’ and to this effect he was dismissed in the September 1981 Cabinet reshuffle. However, Thatcher did write that he left with ‘courteousness and good humour’ which was in contrast to Ian Gilmour who having left the cabinet in the same reshuffle, stormed out of Downing Street, announcing that government policy was ‘heading for the rocks’. Carlisle changed seats at the 1983 UK general election and remained an MP until June 1987 when, later the same year, he was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Carlisle of Bucklow where he still sits as a Conservative.