23 Facts About Richard Body

Sir Richard Bernard Frank Stewart Body was an English politician.

Richard Body was Conservative Member of Parliament for Billericay from 1955 to 1959, for Holland with Boston from 1966 to 1997, and for Boston and Skegness from 1997 until he stood down at the 2001 general election.

Richard Body was a long-standing member of the Conservative Monday Club, and came second in its 1972 election for chairman.

Richard Body's father was from a Berkshire family resident in Shinfield since the 1720s.

Richard Body married the former Marion Graham in 1959, and they had a son and a daughter.

Lady Richard Body was a friend and Bletchley Park colleague of Valerie Middleton, the grandmother of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.

Richard Body served in the Royal Air Force towards the end of World War II.

Richard Body was the Conservative candidate for Deptford at the 1949 London County Council election, then Rotherham in the 1950 United Kingdom general election, Abertillery in a by-election that same year, and then Leek in 1951.

In January 1973, Richard Body was an opponent of Prime Minister Edward Heath's Counter-Inflation Bill, stating that the real cause of inflation was too much government spending.

Rural Buckinghamshire-born, and representing fertile South Holland, Richard Body was an early supporter of environmental causes within the Conservative Party.

Between 1984 and 1993, Richard Body wrote the "Down on the Farm" column in Private Eye, in which he regularly criticised both CAP and environmental mismanagement of farms.

Richard Body was generally regarded as of the "Old Right" of the party, and often found himself at odds with the John Major government and its predecessor, including those influenced by it, who had come to dominate the parliamentary Conservative Party by the mid-1990s.

Richard Body made such views clear in March 2001, shortly before he retired as an MP, writing in the parliamentary magazine The House that the rural and, specifically, the agricultural communities of Britain were the victims of major changes to the culture at Westminster in his time in the Commons, as the number of Tory MPs from landowning or farming backgrounds had declined and the number of self-made men from the suburbs on the Tory benches had increased.

In 1993, Richard Body was tricked into believing he was speaking on the telephone with John Major by the impressionist-comedian Rory Bremner.

Richard Body has been associated with such long-standing figures of the green movement such as Edward Goldsmith, John Seymour, and John Papworth.

Unlike the vast majority of Conservative MPs, Richard Body voted to equalise the age of consent for homosexuals, and supported the legalisation of cannabis.

Richard Body called for an English Parliament in his book England for the English, published in April 2001.

Richard Body's actions regarding Europe eventually led to his resigning the Conservative whip for a temporary period.

Richard Body authored multiple eurosceptic books, including A Europe of Many Circles and The Breakdown of Europe.

On 10 November 1999, Richard Body put forward an Early Day Motion in support of the writer Robert Henderson, who believed that the security services had interfered with his mail and telephone line after he had written allegedly threatening letters to Prime Minister Tony Blair, his wife Cherie, and various Labour MPs.

Richard Body joined the UK Independence Party in 2004, but left UKIP for the English Democrats by 2008.

Richard Body was interviewed in 2012 as part of The History of Parliament's oral history project.

Richard Body died at his home in Stanford Dingley, Berkshire, on 26 February 2018 at the age of 90.