Systems analyst and consultant. Prevented from completing secondary schooling by his class background, he avoided deportation in the summer of 1951 by taking a job in Kazincbarcika as a surveyor's assistant. He later worked on railway construction in Sajószöged. Meanwhile his mother, Julianna Apponyi, was arrested at Christmas 1951, interned, and early in 1953 deported under strict supervision. Pálffy was drafted into the army in the autumn of 1953, arrested at the end of 1955 and held at convict camps in Várpalota and Herend. He was moved to Pécs Prison in the autumn of 1956, but released by Baranya County Revolutionary Workers' Council on November 2. He and his mother left the country at the end of November for England, where he graduated from Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He began working in 1963 as a market researcher, then as a consultant systems analyst. He started his own firm in 1975 and worked in several countries, among his clients being the European Commission. He first revisited Hungary in August 1989 and repatriated permanently in 2000.