Eric Pickles

Eric Jack Pickles, Baron Pickles, (born 20 April 1952) is a British Conservative Party politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Brentwood and Ongar from 1992 to 2017.

Eric Jack Pickles was born on 20 April 1952, the son of Jack and Constance Pickles.

Born in Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Greenhead Grammar School (now Carlton Keighley) and then studied at Leeds Polytechnic.

He was born into a Labour-supporting family – his great-grandfather was one of the founders of the Independent Labour Party, and Pickles described himself as "massively inclined" towards communism as a boy.

After the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, he joined the local Keighley Branch of the Young Conservatives in 1968, later commenting "I joined because of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. I was so shocked by the tanks. It was not the best way of fighting Brezhnev, but it made me feel better".

Pickles soon became the chairman of the local Young Conservatives association.

Pickles was first elected to Bradford Council in 1979, representing the Worth Valley ward.

During his time in the Young Conservatives he became a member of the Joint Committee Against Racism from 1982 to 1987 and later became its chairman.

His period as national Young Conservative chairman saw growing factionalism with challenges from a southern-based right wing to Pickles' moderate leadership.

Pickles also moved against right-wingers in Bradford, expelling the Young Conservative, Yorkshire Chairman of the Monday Club who had stood for the Bradford Wyke Ward on an anti-immigrant platform from the Bradford area constituencies.

From 1982 to 1984, he chaired that Council's Social Services Committee, and then, from 1984 to 1986, he chaired the Education Committee.

Between 1988 and 1990, he served as leader of the Conservative group on the council.

In September 1988 the Conservative Party gained control by using the Conservative mayor's casting vote to become the only inner-city council to be controlled by the Conservatives.

When Bradford Council was hung, Pickles opted to break the agreement that the position of Lord Mayor is rotated between the parties, when he put a Conservative mayor in place again.

This effectively gave the Conservatives a majority due to the Lord Mayor's casting vote.

To do this, they also broke the tradition that the Lord Mayor kept the status quo.

Whilst at Bradford, Pickles announced a five-year plan to cut the council's budget by £50m, reduce the workforce by a third, privatise services and undertake council departmental restructures, many of which proved controversial.

A book, The Pickles Papers, by Tony Grogan, was written about this period in Pickles' life.

Pickles was elected as Member of Parliament for Brentwood and Ongar in 1992.

At the 2001 general election, the independent politician Martin Bell, who had been the MP for Tatton, having run a campaign of "anti-sleaze", stood against Pickles, due to accusations that the Peniel Pentecostal Church had infiltrated the local Conservative branch.

Pickles's vote was reduced from 45.4% to 38%, but he retained his seat by a margin of 2,821 votes (6.5%) becoming elected with 38% of the votes against Bell's 31.5%.

Pickles served as Shadow Minister for Transport and Shadow Minister for London from September 2001 to June 2002, then as Shadow Minister for Local Government from June 2002.

At the 2005 general election Pickles held his seat with 53.5% of the votes and an increased majority of 11,612 (26.3%), nearly as many as the number of votes for the second-placed candidate, making this the second-safest Conservative seat in Eastern England, with Pickles taking the third-highest share of the vote cast in the region.

On 2 July 2007, David Cameron appointed Pickles to a reshuffled Shadow Cabinet as shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

On 30 December 2008, according to reports in The Times, Pickles unveiled plans to "purge town hall 'fat cats'".

The Times reported that under the plans "dozens of council chiefs who earn more than Cabinet ministers would lose their jobs as clusters of councils merged their frontline services and backroom operations to provide better value for money."

Of the eight highest-earning chief executives listed in The Times' report, six were employed by councils run by the Conservative party, one by Labour and one by the Liberal Democrats.

Pickles was the campaign manager for the successful Crewe and Nantwich by-election in May 2008.

He previously served as Chairman of the Conservative Party from 2009 to 2010 and was later the United Kingdom Anti-Corruption Champion from 2015 to 2017.

Following this, he was promoted to Chairman of the Conservative Party, a post he held from January 2009 to May 2010.

He served in David Cameron's Cabinet as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government from 2010 to 2015.

In early 2010, Prime Minister Gordon Brown outlined plans to reform the voting system in the United Kingdom.

Pickles defended the first-past-the-post system as resulting in stable government and attacked Brown, claiming he "now wants to fiddle the electoral system" by wanting to change the voting system.

Pickles was the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government in the coalition government headed by Prime Minister David Cameron from 12 May 2010 to May 2015.

Pickles was appointed the UK Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust issues in 2015.

Although a former Eurosceptic, in January 2016 Pickles became a founding member of the group Conservatives For Reform In Europe, a campaign to remain in the European Union on the basis that the EU would be reformed by the negotiations then being led by Prime Minister David Cameron.

He stood down as an MP at the 2017 general election, but continued in his role as Special Envoy under Prime Ministers Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

He is the chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel in the House of Lords as of 2023.

In April 2017, Pickles announced he would not stand at the general election the following month.

Later that year, he was appointed chairman of the journal Parliamentary Review.