Researching Paul Mason

The son of Arthur James Mason, he was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, taking a first class honours degree in Modern History in 1926.

Joining the Foreign Service in 1928, Mason had overseas postings to Brussels, Sofia, Prague, Ottawa, and Lisbon and also home posts at the Foreign Office in London. He was assistant private secretary to the Foreign Secretary, 1934–1936, then private secretary to the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, 1936–37. He was an acting Counsellor in 1945, then British Minister at Sofia, 1949–1951, before being recalled to London as assistant Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office from 1951 to 1954. He was British Ambassador to the Netherlands, 1954–1960, then Permanent Representative on the North Atlantic Council, 1960–1962 and an Alternate Delegate to the Minister of State in the Geneva Delegation on Disarmament and Nuclear Tests, 1962–1964.

In retirement, Mason was High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire for 1970 and Treasurer of the University of Nottingham from 1972 until his death.

In 1938 he married Roberta, daughter J. Lorn McDougall KC, of Ottawa, and they had one son and one daughter. At the time of his death his address was Morton Hall, Retford, Nottinghamshire, the family seat. He was a member of the Lansdowne Club.

He is a physicist who has carried out research in several areas of geophysical fluid dynamics and dynamical meteorology. Most recently he has carried out theoretical and numerical studies of the influence of topography on turbulent boundary layer flow.

He was President of the Royal Meteorological Society from 1992 to 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1995. He was awarded the Mason Gold Medal of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2005.

When he was in his 20s, he started to eat food as a way to avoid dealing with emotional issues that began in his childhood such as child abuse. Several years earlier he had applied to the National Health Service for gastric bypass surgery, to help him get his weight down. Mason applied several times and in the end waited 10 years before he was approved for surgery. In 2010, two years after beginning counseling, Mason finally had the surgery he desperately needed and wanted. Five years later, he had lost over and weighed around . The surgical removal of of excess skin allowed for greater mobility, which made him able to exercise, and lose more weight. In 2014 he weighed, a total weight loss of . Mason had a further of loose skin removed at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital in May 2015. As of March 2017, Mason weighed and was living in a boarding house in the United States.

In 2018 he split with his girlfriend, after this he got addicted to food again.

In May 2019 Mason revealed that he has almost doubled in size – from to .