Richard Body

Family background

Sir Richard is the son of Bernard Richard Body and his wife, Daphne (formerly Corbett). His father was from an old Berkshire family resident in Shinfield since the 1720s. Through his paternal grandmother, he is a third cousin of theatre director Val May. His wife is the former Marion Graham. Lady Body was a friend and Bletchley Park colleague of Valerie Middleton, the grandmother of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.

Career

Before finally gaining election at Billericay in 1955, Body had fought several elections across the country without success. He was the Conservative candidate for Rotherham in 1950, Abertillery in a by-election that same year, and then Leek in 1951.

In January 1973, Body was an opponent of Edward Heath's Counter-Inflation Bill, stating that the real cause of inflation was too much government spending. Within the Tory party his doubts were shared by Enoch Powell, Ronald Bell and Nicholas Ridley, the last of whom complained that what was needed was a "proper economic policy".

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): in 1983 writing Agriculture: the Triumph and the Shame, a non-fictional agricultural book exposing, it asserted, its folly, followed by Farming in the Clouds (1984). He was also critical over the use of pesticides in agriculture, and led an inquiry on the issue in 1986–87. The enquiry produced a draft report which contained 45 recommendations, mostly influenced by his support for organic farming and use of such methods on his own farms. The report was ignored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which made no response and did not attempt to alter its own favoured methods.

Body was generally regarded as of the "Old Right" of the party, and found himself in disagreement 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. He 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 his later years as an MP Body clearly distanced himself from an ever more 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 Teddy Goldsmith, John Seymour, and John Papworth. Unlike the vast majority of Conservative MPs, Body voted in favour of the equalisation of sexuality activity to apply equally to homosexuals from the age of 16, and also supported the legalisation of cannabis. Body was for a time a member of the UK Independence Party, but has now joined the English Democrats. 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.

In November 1999 Sir Richard Body put forward an Early Day Motion in support of the writer Robert Henderson, who believed that his mail and telephone line had been interfered with by the security services after he had written allegedly threatening letters to 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, widely considered, at least indirectly, racist on the basis of a different test for nationality than that used for all other purposes. Body's motion not only defended Henderson and accused Blair of interfering with Henderson's activities, but referred to "publicly reported incidents of racism within the Labour Party". This may have been an allusion to some controversial remarks about "blue-eyed, blonde Finnish nurses" made by the black Labour MP Diane Abbott, who had earlier accused Henderson of racism.

He is a vice-president of the Society for Individual Freedom. He lives at Stanford Dingley in Berkshire.

His eurosceptic books include A Europe of Many Circles (1990) and The Breakdown of Europe (1998) (which purposefully echoed the title of Leopold Kohr's book The Breakdown of Nations).

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