Political Career
In September 1998, following his selection as a candidate for the Conservative Party in the East Midlands, Helmer left his job as Managing Director of a Leicester textile company, Donisthorpe Ltd (the UK subsidiary of a French textile multinational), to campaign full time ahead of the 1999 euro-elections, and took up his new role as an MEP immediately afterwards.
He was re-elected as a Conservative MEP for the East Midlands Region in 2004. He was suspended from the Conservative Party whip on 26 May 2005 after voting against party instructions on a motion to censure the European Commission and openly criticising his delegation leader, Timothy Kirkhope, in a parliamentary debate; the Conservative party whip was restored on 13 September 2006, but he remained Non-Inscrit. He joined the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), with the other Conservative MEPs, in July 2009.
Having initially advocated the Conservative policy of renegotiating the EU treaties, since 2006 he has been a supporter of the Better Off Out campaign, calling for the UK to leave the EU.
He was appointed Adam Smith Scholar in 2005 by a right wing pressure group in the USA called the American Legislative Exchange Council. As of 15 July 2012 he is still listed as a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council International Relations Task Force.
He became Chairman of the libertarian pressure group, The Freedom Association, in April 2007.
In November 2009 he stepped down as the Conservative party's spokesman on employment in the European parliament because he thought the Conservatives' new policy on not supporting a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty was "confused" and "essentially cosmetic".
It was announced on 2 March 2012 that he had defected from the Conservatives Party to the United Kingdom Independence Party. He faced accusations of hypocrisy as he had demanded in November 2000, that MEP Bill Newton Dunn immediately resign as a result of his move from Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats.
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“It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.”
—Auberon Waugh (b. 1939)