Defiant Eurosceptic and former Tory MP Sir Teddy Taylor dies

Sir Teddy Taylor, former Glasgow MP and arch Eurosceptic, has died at the age of 80, his family said yesterday.

Sir Teddy, who had been ill for some months, died in Southend Hospital late on Wednesday, his wife, Sheila Taylor said.

First entering Parliament as MP for Glasgow Cathcart in 1964, his political career was marked by a fierce loathing of the European Union.

He quit as a Scottish Office minister in 1971 over Edward Heath’s decision to join what was then the Common Market.

Two decades later he was among a band of diehard Tory rebels – the so-called “whipless wonders”– who had the whip withdrawn and were kicked out of the party by John Major over their opposition to the Maastricht Treaty.

In 1979 he was elected MP for Southend East in a by-election, having finally lost marginal Glasgow Cathcart, and held the seat until he retired from parliament in 2005.

His wife said that while he never changed his views on Europe, he had remained devoted to his constituency and its people.

“He loved being an MP here. The great love of his life was helping his constituents. He really cared about Southend and was very well-liked by everybody here,” she said.

Sir Teddy did not miss a single opportunity to proclaim publicly against what

0 Teddy Taylor was an indefatigable and tigerish right-winger who supported the death penalty rather than kowtow to the yoke of Brussels.

Sir Teddy, a nervously heavy smoker but a fierce teetotaller, was an indefatigable and tigerish right-winger who supported the death penalty and Enoch Powell’s campaign to stop immigration.

His uncompromising and unyielding views on Europe meant that, although one of the brightest and busiest and most vigorous of Tory backbenchers, he was effectively ruled out of any further ministerial post. But for this, Margaret Thatcher would almost certainly have appointed him Scottish Secretary when she swept to power in 1979.

He regularly claimed to have exposed skullduggery and flagrant misuse of taxpayers’ money by the Brussels bureaucrats and other unaccountable EU mandarins.