Lord Richard Cecil well established links with Rhodesia, the capital city of which was named Salisbury after the third Marquess (it was renamed Harare in 1982 on the second anniversary of Zimbabwean independence). The family had extensive land holdings in the country and the fifth Marquess (Lord Richard's grandfather) was a leading British supporter of the white minority UDI government that ruled Rhodesia from 1965-1979. Lord Richard was the eldest of the younger brothers of Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, who has been both an MP and the Leader of the House of Lords. In 2003, Cranborne became 7th Marquess of Salisbury upon the
Campaigning for the 2008 Zimbabwean presidential election subsequently filed at the Harare High Court on 17 March. An electronic list would facilitate searching the rolls for discrepancies. The presence in the voter rolls of Desmond Lardner-Burke, a Rhodesian Minister of Law and Order who died decades before, has been pointed to as an example of flaws in the voter rolls. On 20 March, Tsvangirai held a news conference at which he claimed that, in 28 rural constituencies, there were 90,000 names on the voter rolls that could not be accounted for. He said that he based this claim on the work of independent analysts. He also protested