John Redwood

John Alan Redwood (born 15 June 1951 in Dover, Kent) is a British Conservative Party politician, Member of Parliament for Wokingham and formerly Shadow Secretary of State for Deregulation in the Shadow Cabinet. He is currently co-chairman of the Conservative Party's Policy Review Group on Economic Competitiveness.

Redwood had a brilliant academic career behind him (first attending Kent College, Canterbury - before graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford since 1972 and currently a visiting professor at Middlesex University). He was an Oxfordshire County Councillor in the 1970s and became MP for Wokingham in 1987 having previously been the head of Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit in the early to mid 1980s. He was soon made a Minister, joining the front bench in 1989 as Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the DTI for Corporate Affairs. Promoted to Minister of State in 1990, he supervised the liberalisation of the telecoms industry. He became Minister for Local Government and Inner Cities after the 1992 election where he successfully saw through the introduction of the council tax.

By 1993 he was in the cabinet, as Secretary of State for Wales. This role was usually expected to go to an MP for a Welsh constituency, but the 1992 general election had left the Conservatives with only six MPs in Wales, and it was felt that none of them was sufficiently experienced to serve as a cabinet minister.

Redwood was an energetic and somewhat controversial Secretary of State for Wales. He was an exponent of keeping open smaller, older and rural hospitals against the national trend of concentrating larger hospitals in the big cities. He also launched a scheme to provide more funding for popular schools with high numbers of applicants and concentrated extra expenditure on health and education services away from administrative overheads. Despite this, Redwood's perceived haughty manner and apparent disregard for national feeling did not endear him to some of the population, perhaps most notoriously when in 1995 he returned £100,000,000 of Wales' block grant to the UK treasury unspent and when he made a speech in Cardiff stating that before state aid be granted to single mothers, the father should first be contacted to help financially. Redwood's most famous gaffe was his attempt to mime to the Welsh national anthem at a public event, when he appeared to not know the words. Redwood did later sing the Welsh national anthem at numerous events in Wales.

When John Major tendered his resignation as Conservative leader in 1995, Redwood resigned from the cabinet and stood against Major in the subsequent party leadership election. It was on the question of the European Union that Redwood took issue with the party leadership, taking a eurosceptic stance. On this occasion Redwood received 89 votes, around a quarter of the then Parliamentry party. When Major resigned after the 1997 general election defeat, Redwood stood for the leadership again, and was again defeated, though he secured more support than rival candidates Peter Lilley and Michael Howard.

He served in the Shadow Cabinet of eventual winner William Hague, shadowing first the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and then the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, but was controversially dropped in a mini-reshuffle in 2000. In 2001 Hague's successor, Iain Duncan Smith offered Redwood the Shadow Trade and Industry portfolio once more, but he declined. He remained a potent presence on the back benches, making fierce attacks on the government and writing books and pamphlets denouncing the European Union and praising US capitalism.

On 8 September 2004, Michael Howard (by now Leader of the Opposition) added him to the Shadow Cabinet as spokesman on deregulation (a post without a direct counterpart in the current government), in a move seen by many commentators as a reaction to the relative success of the United Kingdom Independence Party in the 2004 European Parliament election.

During the 2005 Conservative leadership campaign, Redwood supported first Liam Fox and then David Cameron. He was appointed Chairman of the Conservative Party's new Policy Review Group on Economic Competitiveness by Cameron in December 2005.

Redwood has also been an active writer of books, including: Stars and Strife, Superpower Struggles, Singing the Blues, The Death of Britain, Our Currency Our Country and Just Say No: 100 Arguments Against The Euro. His latest book, I Want to Make a Difference - But I Don't Like Politics, examines the reasons for the decline in turnout at UK elections and was published in October 2006. He is also a regular contributor to The Times newspaper and contributes to Freedom Today, the journal of the Freedom Association, and The Business and has appeared on 18 Doughty Street Talk TV in December 2006.

Satirised

Redwood's appearance has led to some commentators, originally his former colleague turned political sketch-writer, Matthew Parris, noting similarities between him and Star Trek's Mr. Spock and so Redwood is often called a Vulcan. In line with this, political cartoonists often draw him with pointed ears. It is a comparison which Redwood has taken in good humour.

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