Richard Body

Sir Richard Bernard Frank Stewart Body (born 18 May 1927) is a British politician, and was Conservative MP 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.

Coming from an agricultural background, he was highly critical of 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, and perhaps for this reason it was ignored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, who made no response and did not attempt to alter their own favoured methods as a result.

This, along with a certain eccentric romantic rural Englishness in his character, seemed to place him firmly on the Old Right and distanced him from the Thatcher government and those influenced by it, who had come to dominate the parliamentary Conservative Party by the late 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 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 was publicly associated with such long-standing figures as John Seymour, John Papworth and Teddy Goldsmith, who are often considered "radicals". Unlike the vast majority of Conservative MPs, he voted in favour of legalising gay sex at 16, and he also supported the legalisation of cannabis.

Body's position on the conservative wing of the environmental movement - distant from the increasingly leftist British Green Party - has associated him with a movement which is regarded by left-leaning environmentalists as overtly culturally "authenticist" and bordering on neo-Nazism, while it is dismissed by the mainstream left and right as impossibly romantic, nostalgic and neo-Luddite. He is perhaps the closest thing any mainstream British political party has had to a Euronationalist MP, expressing ideas mainly associated in Britain with the Third Way party led by the former National Front activist Patrick Harrington, and publishing a book in April 2001 entitled "England For The English" (this caused controversy because the phrase was a National Front slogan in the 1970s). His conservative-environmentalist position is also probably the closest any British MP has ever come to the position closely associated with Prince Charles.

Sir Richard Body is perhaps most famous, however, for his fervent Euroscepticism which led to him becoming one of the "bastards" condemned by John Major in 1993, which eventually lost him the Tory whip for a period. Major claimed that Body's ideas were so mad that at the very mention of Body's name Major "heard the flapping of white coats".

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 and was widely considered racist; 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.