The British politician Sir David Martin Scott Steel (born 1938) was a Scottish member of Parliament and leader of the Liberal Party beginning in 1976.

David Steel was born on March 31, 1938, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. His father was the Very Rev. Dr. David Steel, a Calvinist minister. From the age of 11 to 15 Steel was with his family in Kenya, Africa where he developed a sympathetic understanding of the plight of Black Africans. (He was president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement of Great Britain from 1966 to 1969.) He was educated at the Prince of Wales School in Nairobi, and afterwards, back in Scotland, at George Watson's College and at Edinburgh University, where he earned an M.A. in 1960 and an LL.B. in 1962.

At Edinburgh University he joined the Liberal Party, and it provided him with a career for life. He was not able to join the Labour Party because he did not feel...