A FORMER West Somerset student has been recognised in the King’s Birthday Honours List by being appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order (MVO).

Chief Insp Chris Conrad, who has served in the Metropolitan Police for more than 23 years, received the honour from King Charles in recognition of his 10 years working in Royalty and specialist protection.

The Royal Victorian Order is a dynastic order of knighthood established in 1896 by Queen Victoria and recognises distinguished personal service to the monarch or other members of the Royal family.

Mr Conrad, aged 50, who was brought up in Timberscombe, on Exmoor, attended the West Somerset Community College, in Minehead, and left in 1991.

He became an officer cadet in the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where all officers in the British Army are trained to take on the responsibility of leading their soldiers, and then served with the Gurkha Regiment in Hong Kong, and became a police officer in the Cambridgeshire Constabulary 1996.

His career as a firearms officer in the Metropolitan Police has included protecting diplomats and Royal family protection.

Mr Conrad has been a hostage negotiator in some of the most harrowing of circumstances, and was chosen in 2020 to attend a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) national hostage and crisis negotiation course in the USA.

During the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings from 2010, Mr Conrad deployed across the Middle East to safeguard British Embassies during the turmoil and uncertainties then prevailing.

He later became involved with the Prince’s Trust on youth engagement programmes, setting up the first international police-led programme in Barbados in 2016.

By the end of his three-year appointment, 3,500 young people in the UK and across the world were going through his bespoke youth programmes.

For the past 10 years Mr Conrad has led on the close protection for the Royal family, travelling all over the UK and abroad.

He led 1,400 staff in the protection arrangements for the late Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee, and for her funeral, and then for the Coronation of King Charles III, which was the largest protection operation ever in the UK involving 300 heads of state, and Government and foreign VIPs.

Mr Conrad organised police and other security services from all over the UK to deliver these iconic and historic national events.

Described as a senior leader of threat mitigation and protective security operations and international event management, he has been commended for bravery during his policing career when disabling a man armed with a knife, and for his work during the 7/7 London Underground and bus bombings in 2005 when four Islamist terrorists killed 52 people and injured more than 770 others.

Mr Conrad now lives with his family in Cambridgeshire, but still often visits West Somerset, where his father Peter lives in Blue Anchor.

He said: “I have always undertaken my deployments with the intention of enhancing the safety and security of those people I have been charged with helping.

“Always, I hope, with professionalism, enthusiasm, humility, and humour.”