Edward Kellett-Bowman, Tory MEP who railed against the European ‘butter mountain’ – obituary

Edward Kellett-Bowman, who has died aged 91, was one of the first directly elected Conservative members of the European Parliament, serving for five years in a unique partnership with his wife, Dame Elaine, then later for 11 on his own; he was said by one awed commentator to exude “mastery of both Thatcherism and Euro-speak”.

Edward Bowman’s priority was success in the pharmacy trade until, after his first wife Margaret, née Blakemore, died in 1970, he met the also-widowed Elaine Kellett, a fellow Camden councillor seven years his senior, added her surname to his, then married her after her election as MP for Lancaster.

Her infectious enthusiasm gave his career a new direction: she had run a dairy farm and trained as a barrister while raising four children and recovering from a car crash that had erased her memory. He took an MBA at Cranfield, started a management consultancy and began looking for a seat so as to partner her at Westminster.

Kellett-Bowman was shortlisted for Skipton in 1975, but having no further success, he turned to Europe. His wife was already one of the MPs who doubled as members of the Strasbourg assembly, and when elections were held in 1979 both were successful, she for Cumbria and he for Lancashire East becoming the parliament’s first husband-and-wife team.

One issue he took up was the growing “butter mountain” thrown up by the Common Agricultural Policy; he was furious when the Commission withdrew a scheme it had proposed to give pensioners cheap butter at Christmas.

In 1984 he stood for re-election, while his wife – an Oxford contemporary of Margaret Thatcher and one of her strongest supporters – gave up her Euro seat to concentrate on Westminster. But the tide was running for Labour and he was defeated by 7,905 votes.

Kellett-Bowman returned to consultancy, while supporting his wife’s work as an MP. But in 1988 his former Strasbourg colleague Basil de Ferranti died, and in a by-election that December he held de Ferranti’s Hampshire Central seat with a majority halved to 21,000. In the campaign he stressed the Conservative commitment to “Enterprise Britain” in Europe, and his opposition to federalism.

He held the seat the following year, and in 1989 was re-elected for the redrawn constituency of Itchen, Test and Avon, in which the couple now lived. When proportional representation and regional lists for European elections were introduced in 1994, he stood again, unsuccessfully.

Before that, he suggested that Grimsby fishermen riot and attack public buildings after the Commission paid £80,000 towards damage caused when their Breton counterparts tried to burn down the old parliament building in Rennes. “This was a deliberate act of vandalism, which the French police seem to have viewed as a spectator sport,” he fumed.

He was born Edward Thomas Bowman on February 25 1931. Educated at Reed’s School, Cobham, he went into the textile industry on the technical side and within two years was in management. In 1955 he moved to a firm of chemists, staying in the business 17 years before setting up his consultancy practice.

Bowman was a Holborn councillor from his mid-20s, and a member of the London County Council before its replacement by the GLC. He was elected to the new Camden Council, but resigned after six years when his first wife died, leaving him with four children aged from three to nine.

Within months he regretted the decision, and was saved by Elaine Kellett’s selection as candidate for Lancaster. She resigned as an alderman, and he took her seat. Within months they married.

Edward Kellett-Bowman was a freeman of the City of London, a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights and a Middlesex JP.

Elaine Kellett-Bowman died in 2014. He is survived by three sons and a daughter from his first marriage, and four stepchildren.

Edward Kellett-Bowman, born February 25 1931, died November 21 2022