Sir John Alec Biggs-Davison (7 June 1918 – 17 September 1988) was a Conservative Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom for Chigwell from 1955 and then, after boundary changes in 1974, Epping Forest until his death. He was a leading figure in the Conservative Monday Club. Early years The son of Major John Norman Biggs-Davison, Royal Garrison Artillery, (d. 1972), of Somerset, and his wife Sarah (née Wright), John Alec Biggs-Davison was born at Boscombe, Bournemouth, raised a Roman Catholic, and educated at Clifton College and Magdalen College, Oxford. While at university, he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Political career As an Oxford undergraduate, he was seconder to Basil Liddell Hart opposing conscription at the Oxford Union debate held on 27 April 1939. He into the Royal Marines in 1939. From 1942 he worked for the Indian Civil Service and the Pakistan Administrative Service, where he was an assistant commissioner in the Punjab before being deputed to Bengal. He was the Conservative candidate for Coventry South in the 1951 general election. He became a Conservative Party Member of Parliament in 1955 but resigned the Conservative Whip and sat as an Independent 1957–58 in opposition to the government's withdrawal from Suez following direct pressure from the US and Soviet governments. He subsequently resumed the Conservative Whip. Despite wariness of the United States, he supported the setting up of an American-style broadcasting system in the UK; shortly before the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act became law in 1967, he was heard on the offshore station Radio 270 stating that "a voice of freedom will have been silenced when Radio 270 goes off the air" (ref. The Times, 11 August 1967). When some Labour Party members called for his old friend Enoch Powell to be prosecuted under the Race Relations Act (see Letter-to-the-Editor, Daily Telegraph 22 November 1968), Biggs-Davison leapt to Powell's defence in an acrimonious House of Commons debate during which Harold Wilson was accused of being an enemy of free speech. In late January 1975, he gave a warning that the Azores could become a Soviet naval base instead of American because of the revolution in Portugal. That year, during a House of Commons debate on the Trades Union Congress invitation to Alexander Shelepin, the former Soviet KGB Chief, to visit Britain, Biggs-Davison compared him to Heinrich Himmler. He was the Conservative Party's Opposition Shadow Cabinet