Philip Bushill-Matthews MEP

A short CV

Born in Droitwich, brought up in Birmingham and educated at Malvern College, he joined Unilever as a marketing trainee after graduating from Oxford University.  This began a successful career in food manufacturing, becoming the youngest ever Board member of Birds Eye Walls Ltd as Sales & Distribution Director.

Since then he has run an ice-cream business in Portugal and a snack-foods business in the Netherlands as well as various companies in the UK.  He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program and a Fellow of the Institute of Directors.

Fed up with increasing regulations from politicians with no experience of the real world, in 1998 he became a candidate for the European Parliament and was elected to represent his home region of the West Midlands in June 1999.  In June 2004 he was re-elected as N°1 in the West Midlands region, and has been re-appointed Conservative Employment & Social Affairs spokesman in the European Parliament.  He is a Vice-President of the SME Circle where he is active in promoting the cause of small businesses and the liberation of enterprise.  He is also a Vice-President of the Ageing Intergroup and the All-Party Group on Kashmir.

In the UK, he is a member of English Heritage, the Country Land & Business Association and the CPRE (where he is Vice-President of the Warwickshire branch).

In September 2003 he published "The Gravy Train" about life in the European Parliament.  In early 2005 he published a second book : "Who rules Britannia ?"

Happily married to Angela since 1967, with three children and five grandchildren, he lives in Harbury, a village near Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, though he admits to spending more time in Brussels.