Personal profile of Edward McMillan-Scott

Edward McMillan-Scott comes from a farming and professional background. Born in Cambridge on August 15 1949 he is one of seven children.  He was educated privately by the Dominican friars. At school he ran the debating society and the printing press.

As a young man he was a tour director with a US company, taking groups across Europe, the former Soviet Union - where he was briefly arrested for straying off the tourist path in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) - as well as Africa.

Edward's father Walter (below) was elected last pre-war President of Pop (the Eton College prefects). He served in the Royal Navy and qualified at Cambridge University as an architect. He died in 1999.  His mother Elisabeth primarily did charity work for groups such as SSAFA (needy ex-Soldiers' Sailors' and Airmans' Association), the Womens' Institute and Roman Catholic charities. She died in 2004.

In 1967 Edward joined the Conservative Party. He was a busy branch member, and later became a branch chairman up to and through the 1983 General Election.

In 1972 he married Henrietta, from a branch of his maternal family. They have two daughters - Lucinda (l) born in 1973 and Arabella (r) born in 1976 - and two grand-daughters.

In 1975 he joined a large public relations firm and from 1976 specialised in governmental and parliamentary relations. Among his clients was the Falkland Islands Committee, set up to represent the islanders in the UK, which he worked for throughout the 1982 Argentine invasion.

In 1983 he set up his own Whitehall public affairs consultancy: he then represented the Falkand Islands Government and a number of commercial clients.

In 1984 he was elected to the European Parliament to represent the York Euro-constituency, which included most of the county of North Yorkshire and parts of North Lincolnshire.

He was re-elected in 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004 and 2009.

From 1997 - 2001 he was leader of the Conservatives in the European Parliament and sat on the Europe committee of the Shadow Cabinet, which he also attended. He was a member of the 2009 Conservative Party's Election Strategy Committee and also the Candidates Committee.

After a dispute with David Cameron over the Conservatives' new EU alliance, he joined the Liberal Democrats in March 2010.

His hobbies are reading, classical music, conservation and modern art                                                                         

Edward McMillan-Scott's CV

 
Edward McMillan-Scott was first elected an MEP for Yorkshire & The Humber in 1984 and was last re-elected on June 7 2009. He was elected Vice-President of the European Parliament in July 2004 and re-elected in 2006 and 2009. His portfolio includes democracy and human rights and relations with the EU's national parliaments. He is chairman of the European Parliament's Audit Panel.

He was leader of the Conservatives in the European Parliament 1997 - 2001 and was described by The Times as a 'moderate pro-European with a general loyalty to the party line'.  He was responsible for a renewed link for Conservative MEPs with the centre-right European Peoples' Party (EPP) group in 1999.

He objected to David Cameron's leadership pledge to leave the EPP and to the extremist backgrounds of some Members of the Conservative leader's new European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, formed after the European election in 2009. He then successfully stood against the candidate nominatedby the ECR for Vice-President of the European Parliament. He was expelled by the Conservative Party - an unpredentedly severe sanction - and appealed. But his lawyers said he would never get a fair hearing and so he resigned from the Conservative Party and joined the UK Liberal Democrats in March 2010. He has always favoured electoral reform, fair taxation, Europe and civil liberties: "The Conservative Party had become an increasingly uncomfortable place for me" he said. He sits as an Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) Vice-President in the European Parliament.

In the European Parliament he has focussed on democracy and human rights. He was Conservative spokesman on Foreign Affairs for many years. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, his “European Democracy Initiative” has spent €140M each year developing democracy and civil society worldwide, but especially in the ex-Soviet bloc and Islamic world. Several hundred projects have been financed, from grass-roots activity to pan-European programmes. His key areas of interest are the 'difficult' countries - China, Cuba, Burma, Iran, North Korea, Russia and the whole of the Arab world. He was the first politician to visit Cairo after the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

He was chief parliamentary observer to the Palestine presidential election in 2005 and parliamentary elections in 2006 and chaired the informal mission to the Egyptian legislative elections in 2005.

He was the European Parliament's rapporteur on relations with Turkey and with China during the 1994 -99 parliament and was the first politician to visit Tibet in 1996 after a three-year embargo. He is a founding member of the Washington-based International Movement of Parliamentarians for Democracy.

He was the European Parliament’s first tourism spokesman, from 1984-91, and the European Year of Tourism (1990) was his project. After he exposed fraud by a European Commission official and others, he was singled out by ‘whistleblower’ Paul Van Buitenen for his role in the 1999 fall of the Commission.

His campaign against timeshare and Costa Villa fraud and malpractice won wide support, and led to both EU and national consumer laws.

Born in Cambridge in 1949, he was educated privately by the Dominican friars. He was a tour manager for a US company in Europe, Africa, Scandinavia and the USSR and then a parliamentary and government affairs consultant in London, founding his own company. His clients included the Falkland Islands Government, Electronic Data Systems and the Channel Tunnel Group.

He is a Patron of the BBC World Service Trust, Member of Court of University of Bradford and the Liaison Committee of the National Coal Mining Museum for England. He speaks French, Italian, some Spanish and German.

He comes from a farming and professional background and is married to Henrietta, a lawyer specialising in children's rights. They have two daughters, Lucy (born 1973) and Arabella (born 1976) and two grand-daughters.