Political Career
As an Oxford undergraduate, he was seconder to Basil Liddell Hart opposing conscription at the Oxford Union debate held on 27 April 1939. His early career was in the Indian Civil Service and the Pakistan Administrative Service. He was the Conservative candidate for Coventry South in 1951 general election. He became a Conservative Party Member of Parliament in 1955 but resigned the Conservative Whip and sat as an Independent 1957-58 in opposition to the government's withdrawal from Suez following direct pressure from the US and Soviet governments. He subsequently resumed the Conservative Whip.
Despite wariness of the United States, he supported the setting up of an American-style broadcasting system in the UK; shortly before the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act became law in 1967, he was heard on the offshore station Radio 270 stating that "a voice of freedom will have been silenced when Radio 270 goes off the air" (ref. The Times, 11 August 1967).
When some Labour Party members called for his old friend Enoch Powell to be prosecuted under the Race Relations Act (see Letter-to-the-Editor, Daily Telegraph 22 November 1968), John Biggs-Davison leapt to Powell's defence in an acrimonious House of Commons debate during which Harold Wilson was accused of being an enemy of free speech.
In late January 1975, he gave a warning that the Azores could become a Soviet naval base instead of American because of the revolution in Portugal. That year, during a House of Commons debate on the Trades Union Congress invitation to Alexander Shelepin, the former Soviet KGB Chief, to visit Britain, Biggs-Davison compared him to Heinrich Himmler.
He was the Conservative Party's Opposition Shadow Cabinet Spokesman for Northern Ireland, 1976–78, and was also Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party's Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Committee, and a member of the 1922 Committee Executive. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1981. The Primrose League Gazette carried an obituary in the form of a tribute to Biggs-Davison in their November/December 1988 edition.
Read more about this topic: John Biggs-Davison
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