John Loveridge

Sir John Warren Loveridge (9 September 1925 – 13 November 2007) was a British Conservative Party Member of Parliament (MP) for 13 years, from 1970 to 1983. He was also the owner of a London secretarial college, a farmer in the West Country, and a published poet and an abstract sculptor.

Loveridge fought several elections for the Liberal Party, but joined the Conservative Party in 1949. He contested Aberavon in the 1951 general election, a Labour Party safe seat, and stood unsuccessfully for the London County Council in Brixton in 1952. He served as a Conservative member of Hampstead Borough Council from 1953 to 1959. He became a magistrate in London in 1963, but also acquired farming interests in the West Country. He bought the 1,800-acre (7.3 km2) Bindon Manor estate near Axmouth in Devon in 1962, and restored the house.

He fought Hornchurch at the 1970 general election, winning back a seat that the Conservative Party had lost in 1966 with a majority of 5,830. After boundary changes in 1974, he fought the more marginal seat of Upminster, winning the two elections in February and October 1974 by 1,008 and then 694 votes respectively (meanwhile, Labour regained Hornchurch). He built a larger majority in later elections, and served on several influential backbench committees in the House of Commons. He retained the seat until he retired from parliament in 1983 to concentrate on his business interests.[3] He continued to work for local constituency and regional party committees, and was knighted in 1988. He was the founder of the Dinosaurs Club for former Conservative MPs, serving as its chairman and later president, and also a liveryman of the Girdlers' Company.

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