The former backbench Tory MP Sir Richard Shepherd, who has died aged 79, ploughed a sometimes lonely but always widely respected furrow as one of the party’s libertarians, even when he fell foul of ministers’ wishes and the demands of three-line whips. Holding the executive to account was ultimately more important to him than toeing the party line.
Independent-minded and Eurosceptic, he gave fervent, even emotional, support to the concept of open government and freedom of information during a long career in the Commons. He was never promoted to ministerial office – nor would he probably have wanted to be – but he was, rather to his surprise and embarrassment, knighted in 2013. He stood down as an MP at the 2015 general election, after representing the constituency of Aldridge-Brownhills in the West Midlands for 36 years.
Shepherd was born in Aberdeen, the son of Davida (nee Wallace) and Alfred Shepherd, but educated in London, first at Isleworth grammar school and then at the London School of Economics, where he studied economics, going on afterwards to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
In 1970 he set up a family grocery business, Shepherd Foods – the first convenience store chain to offer late-night shopping – and as an MP worked in the mornings from a backroom at the firm’s Drury Lane office, assisted by his sister, Davida. He also founded, in 1972, the family’s more upmarket grocery company, Partridges, in the Sloane Street area of Chelsea, run by his brother, John, which received a royal warrant in 1994. Unlike an increasing number of Tory MPs therefore, he could claim first-hand and continuing business experience.
A friend and former assistant to the longstanding Conservative backbench Eurosceptic Teddy Taylor, Shepherd contested the Nottingham East constituency in the February 1974 election, but found a more permanent, though not necessarily safer, berth in the suburban Walsall seat of Aldridge-Brownhills, which he won from Labour in 1979 and held through the eight subsequent elections.
The conjunction between West Midlanders and their ascetic, intellectual, southerner MP was not necessarily an obvious one, but his home-owning, small-business-orientated constituents clearly appreciated Shepherd and although his majority slipped to just 2,500 in the Blair landslide of 1997, by 2010 it was 15,256 and he was elected with 59% of the vote.
In the Commons, Shepherd was one of the Maastricht rebels of the 1990s, but he was never one of the swivel-eyed tendency of Europhobes whom John Major characterised as needing the men with white coats. His was a more fastidious and principled opposition, based on constitutional considerations, concerning the sovereignty of parliament, rather than the ill-concealed xenophobia of some Maastricht rebels.
This concern for parliamentary sovereignty led him to his stands against government secrecy, manipulation and dissembling, conveyed by his occasionally almost overwrought interventions as he stood, nearly alone on his side, against ministerial obfuscation. Never was this more pointed than in his defiance of a three-line whip to oppose the government’s handling of the Scott report on the arms to Iraq inquiry in 1996.
The lengthy report, three years in the making, exposed ministerial inaccuracies and evasions and outright duplicity in the government’s prosecution of the Matrix Churchill engineering company, which had exported components to Iraq with what it understood to be ministers’ approval. Shepherd was outraged, voting against the government even though the embattled prime minister, Major, had made the issue a vote of confidence. In the event, showing just how brave Shepherd’s stand was, the administration survived with a majority of just one.
His concern about individual liberty extended more widely too: he voted against the imposition of control orders on terrorist suspects, against the introduction of identity cards and against giving the authorities the power to detain suspects for lengthy periods without charge. Perhaps his most lasting memorial will be his private members’ bill protecting whistleblowers, which, highly unusually for a non-government measure, was incorporated in statute as part of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998.
Shepherd exercised his own liberty as a smoker. He was genial and approachable and made friends across the political spectrum – including with Guardian journalists researching and campaigning on similar issues to his own. In 2000 he stood for Speaker of the Commons, coming third – an indication of fellow MPs’ esteem – as the Labour MP Michael Martin was elected thanks to Labour arm-twisting.
In his constituency, Shepherd served as president of Walsall Football Club.
He is survived by his siblings, John and Davida.
• Richard Charles Scrimgeour Shepherd, politician, born 6 December 1942; died 19 February 2022
• This article was amended on 23 February 2022, to correct the date of Sir Richard Shepherd’s death, which an earlier version gave as 21 February.
