John Redwood

In statements to media and in the House of Commons, Redwood has consistently defended the position that the UK should not pay the so called Brexit bill (amounting to around £39 billion). This is in line with a House of Lords EU financial affairs committee report, which itself is contested on its legal soundness since the financial settlement simply reflects commitments already entered into by the UK under the EU's multi-annual financial framework for the years 2014–2020 and therefore is not linked to the process of the UK leaving the European Union.

Redwood is a veteran Eurosceptic. A critic of the Euro before its launch, in 2011 Redwood suggested that the Eurozone should "break up", and proposed that the United Kingdom should give up its Council voting rights in return for the ability to opt out of any EU legislation. There are no existing laws that would permit such an arrangement, as it would make European law not apply evenly across the Union as a whole. Later that year, he joined 81 rebel Conservative MPs in voting for an in-out referendum for leaving the European Union, saying afterwards "People used to call me an extreme Eurosceptic. Now I’m a moderate." Before the Brexit referendum, Redwood wrote that, to Conservative Eurosceptics like him, leaving the EU was "more important than which party wins the next election or who is the prime minister."

Redwood was interviewed about the rise of Thatcherism for the BBC television documentary series of 2006, Tory! Tory! Tory!, and has often appeared on television, including appearances on the BBC's Question Time.

Redwood was subsequently appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Trade and Industry by the victorious William Hague. He was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions in June 1999, but was dropped in a mini reshuffle in February 2000, being succeeded by Archie Norman.

When Major resigned as party leader after the General Election defeat of May 1997, Redwood stood in the resulting election for the leadership, and was again defeated. After being defeated in the third round with 38 votes to Kenneth Clarke's 64 and William Hague's 62, Redwood surprisingly backed Clarke against Hague.

In February 1995, he was at loggerheads with the Countryside Council for Wales, because he had decided to cut its grant by 16%. 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.

Redwood consequently gained a somewhat haughty reputation with apparent disregard for national feeling; this did not endear him further to some of the population, including when he returned £100 million of Wales's block grant to the Treasury unspent in 1995. Redwood committed a memorable gaffe in 1993, when he attempted to mime to the Welsh national anthem at the Welsh Conservative Party conference, when he clearly did not know the words. Redwood subsequently learned the anthem but, in August 2007, an unconnected news story on Redwood was illustrated with the same clip. This resulted in Conservative activists filing complaints, and as a result the BBC apologised to Redwood for airing the dated footage.

When John Major called upon his critics to "put up or shut up" and tendered his resignation to allow for a leadership challenge, Redwood resigned from the Cabinet, and stood against Major in the subsequent party leadership election on 26 June 1995. In the ballot held on 4 July 1995, Redwood received 89 votes, around a quarter of the then Parliamentary Party. Major received 218 votes, or two thirds of the parliamentary party vote. The newspaper The Sun had declared its support for Redwood in the run up to the leadership contest, running the front page headline "Redwood versus Deadwood".

Redwood has voted against key LGBT rights questions, being opposed to attempts to reduce the age of consent for homosexuality in both 1994 and 1999, choosing to vote to keep Section 28 in November 2003 and being generally opposed to same-sex marriage. He also voted for the reintroduction of capital punishment in 1988, 1990 and 1994. Redwood has stated since then: "I have never spoken or written against civil partnerships and gay marriage and am not proposing any change to current laws. I regard the debate about capital punishment as being over and do not support its reintroduction. I never spoke or wrote in its favour."

Redwood is a veteran Eurosceptic who was described in 1993 as a "pragmatic Thatcherite". He was the co-chairman of the Conservative Party's Policy Review Group on Economic Competitiveness until 2010. He has the role of Chief Global Strategist of investment management company Charles Stanley & Co Ltd (part of Charles Stanley Group). Redwood is a long-term critic of the European Union and of the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union. Redwood is a member of the British Eurosceptic pressure group Leave Means Leave. He supported Brexit in the 2016 EU Referendum.

In the Government reshuffle of May 1993, Redwood was appointed to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Wales. He deferred some road-widening schemes in Wales because of suggested harm to the environment.

Redwood became MP for Wokingham in June 1987. Redwood was made a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in July 1989 for Corporate Affairs at the Department of Trade and Industry. In November 1990, he was promoted to Minister of State. Redwood became Minister for Local Government and Inner Cities after the 1992 General Election, where he oversaw the abolition of the Community Charge, known as the "Poll Tax", and its replacement with the Council Tax.

He married Gail Felicity Chippington, a barrister, on 20 April 1974 in Chipping Norton; they had two children, Catherine (born 1978) and Richard (born 1982). The marriage broke down after 28 years, and they divorced a year later in July 2003.

He was an Oxfordshire County Councillor between 1973 and 1977, the youngest ever at the age of 21 when elected, and stood in the Peckham by-election of October 1982 where he lost to Harriet Harman. From 1983 onwards, he headed up Margaret Thatcher's policy unit, where he was one of the champions of privatisation.

Redwood was educated at Kent College, Canterbury, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated BA in modern history, and in 1972 was elected a Fellow by examination of All Souls College, Oxford, which later led to a distinguished fellowship. At All Souls, he wrote a DPhil thesis which investigated the fear of atheism in England, from the Restoration to the publication of Alciphron by George Berkeley. He graduated DPhil in 1975.

Redwood worked as an investment analyst, manager and director for Robert Fleming and for NM Rothschild in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2007 he co-founded Evercore Pan-Asset Capital Management Ltd, a financial management company, which was subsequently sold to Charles Stanley. He is currently Chief Global Strategist at Charles Stanley & Co Ltd. He was previously a non-executive chairman of Mabey Securities, an investment arm of the engineering firm Mabey.

Sir John Alan Redwood (born 15 June 1951) is a British Conservative Party politician, and Member of Parliament (MP) for Wokingham in the county of Berkshire. He was formerly Secretary of State for Wales in Prime Minister John Major's Cabinet, and was twice an unsuccessful challenger for the leadership of the Conservative Party in the 1990s.

John Redwood was born in Dover, the second child of William Redwood (1925—2016), an accountant and company secretary, and his wife, Amy Emma (née Champion), the manager of a shoe shop. He had an elder sister, Jennifer, who died as a baby in 1949. He grew up in a council house, and describes his family buying their own house as a "big breakthrough" for the family.