Richard Body

Sir Richard Bernard Frank Stewart Body (18 May 1927 – 26 February 2018) was an English politician. He 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. He was a long-standing member of the Conservative Monday Club, and came second in its 1972 election for chairman. A prominent eurosceptic, Body also served as president of the Anti-Common Market League.

Family background and early life Sir Richard was born in Datchet, then in Buckinghamshire, in 1927, the son of Bernard Richard Body and his wife, Daphne (formerly Corbett). His father was from a Berkshire family resident in Shinfield since the 1720s. Through his paternal grandmother, he was a third cousin of theatre director Val May. He attended the Reading School, and later the Inns of Court School of Law. He married the former Marion Graham in 1959, and they had a son and a daughter. Lady Body was a friend and Bletchley Park colleague of Valerie Middleton, the grandmother of Catherine, Princess of Wales. He served in the Royal Air Force towards the end of World War II.

Rural Buckinghamshire-born, and representing fertile South Holland, Body was an early supporter of environmental causes within the Conservative Party. Coming from a British agriculture perspective, he was highly critical of many aspects associated with the heavily subsidised agriculture associated with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Economic Community (EEC).

He was knighted in 1986. The incident prompted Cabinet Secretary Robin Butler to warn Channel 4 head Michael Grade against any further calls for fear that state secrets could be inadvertently leaked.

In his later years as an MP, Body clearly distanced himself from an increasingly economic-rationalist and internationalist Tory party by associating himself with a number of environmentalist groups who disapproved of large national or free trade groupings and supported smaller, more "natural" and "organic" communities. He 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, Body voted to equalise the age of consent for homosexuals, and also supported the legalisation of cannabis. He called for an English Parliament in his book England for the English, published in April 2001.

Body's fervent euroscepticism led to him being numbered amongst the rebellious "bastards" condemned by John Major in 1993. His actions regarding Europe eventually led to his resigning the Conservative whip for a temporary period. He authored multiple eurosceptic books, including A Europe of Many Circles (1990) and The Breakdown of Europe (1998) (which deliberately echoed the title of Leopold Kohr's book The Breakdown of Nations).

On 10 November 1999, 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. This followed an article by Henderson in Wisden Cricket Monthly in 1995 entitled "Is it in the blood?" which suggested that only "unequivocal Englishmen" should play cricket for England. He was interviewed in 2012 as part of The History of Parliament's oral history project.

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

Books

Agriculture: Triumph and the Shame (1982), Avebury Farming in the Clouds (1984), Temple Smith Red or Green for Farmers (and the Rest of Us) (1987), Broad Leys A Europe of Many Circles: Constructing a Wider Europe (1990), New European Our Food, Our Land: Why Contemporary Farming Practices Must Change, (1991) Rider The Breakdown of Europe: An Alternative to the European Union (1998) New European England for the English (2001), New European A Democratic Europe: The Alternative to the European Union (2006), New European