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. He was a long-standing member of the Conservative Monday Club and came second in its 1972 election for chairman. As a green Conservative he could be seen as years ahead of his time (the current Tory leader, David Cameron has embraced green politics). May 18 the 138th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (139th in leap years). ... 1927 (MCMXXVII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... The Conservative Party is the largest political party on the right-of-centre in the United Kingdom. ... A Member of Parliament, or MP, is a representative elected by the voters of an electoral district to a parliament; in the Westminster system, specifically to the lower house. ... Billericay is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. ... 1955 (MCMLV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1959 (MCMLIX) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1966 (MCMLXVI) was a common year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1966 calendar). ... 1997 (MCMXCVII in Roman) is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Boston and Skegness is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII in Roman) is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The UK general election, 2001 was held on 7 June 2001 and was dubbed the quiet landslide by the media. ... The Conservative Monday Club (widely known as The Monday Club) is a British right-wing pressure-group with its origins in the Conservative Party. ... David William Donald Cameron (born 9 October 1966) is a British politician, Leader of the Conservative Party, and Leader of Her Majestys Loyal Opposition in the House of Commons. ...

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. 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food was a UK government department, first created in September 1793 (relaunched in 1889) and called the Board of Agriculture. ...

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. The Old Right refers to separate political groups in the United Kingdom and the United States. ... Margaret Hilda Roberts Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC (born 13 October 1925) is a British politician and the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a position she held from 1979 to 1990. ... The 1990s decade refers to the years from 1990 to 1999, inclusive. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... Westminster is a district within the City of Westminster in London. ...

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. He has shown a liberal side to his politics when, unlike the vast majority of Conservative MPs, voted in favour of legalising gay sex at 16, and he also supported the legalisation of cannabis. Edward (Teddy) Goldsmith (b. ... John Seymour (12 June 1914 – 14 September 2004) was an influential figure in the self-sufficiency movement. ... Species Cannabis indica Cannabis ruderalis Cannabis sativa This is one of several related articles about 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 dismissed by the mainstream left and right as impossibly romantic, nostalgic and neo-Luddite. He is a complex character perhaps the closest thing any mainstream British political party has had to a green English nationalist MP. He has expressed ideas mainly associated in Britain with fringe parties such as the English Democrats and called for an English Parliament in his book published in April 2001 entitled England For The English. His conservative-environmentalist position is also probably the closest any British MP has ever come to the position closely associated with HRH The Prince of Wales. The Green Party was formed in 1973 as the Ecology Party. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... The Prince of Wales The Prince Charles, Prince of Wales (Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor) (born 14 November 1948), is the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. ...

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". Euroscepticism is scepticism about, or disagreement with, the purposes of the European Union, sometimes coupled with a wish to preserve national sovereignty. ... Sir John Major, KG, CH (born 29 March 1943) is a British politician who served in the Cabinets of Margaret Thatcher as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer before succeeding Thatcher as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1990... 1993 (MCMXCIII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and marked the Beginning of the International Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1993-2003). ...

His most well known books have been on eurosceptic themes and include A Europe of Many Circles and The Breakdown of Europe (which purposefully echoed Leopold Kohr's book The Breakdown of Nations). Leopold Kohr (born October 5, 1909 in Austria/Oberndorf near Salzburg, died February 26, 1994 in Gloucester, England) was an economist, jurist, political scientist and a practicing philosopher. ...