John Stevens (English politician)
John Christopher Courtenay Stevens is a British politician active in Rejoin EU, who founded and formerly led the Conservative Party">Conservative Party (UK)">Conservative Party. A Conservative Member of the European Parliament from 1989 to 1999, he contested the Buckingham constituency in the 2010 [United Kingdom general election|2010 general election] as an independent, against Speaker [of the House of Commons (United Kingdom)|Commons speaker] John Bercow and came second with 10,331 votes compared to Bercow's 22,860.
Background
Stevens was educated at Winchester, where he won the Boxing Cup, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, taking a third class honours degree in law. He then worked as a foreign exchange and bond trader for Morgan Grenfell.He was the Conservative Member of the European Parliament for Thames Valley from 1989 [European Parliament election in the United Kingdom|1989] to 1999 [European Parliament election in the United Kingdom|1999], before leaving the party in protest over its increasingly Eurosceptic positioning. He then co-founded, along with Brendan Donnelly, the Pro-Euro Conservative Party in that year. He contested the 1999 [Kensington and Chelsea by-election] for the PECP and came fourth.
The PECP was wound up in 2001 and Stevens joined the Liberal Democrats. He left the party in 2010 to stand in the 2010 general election against the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, and the leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, in Buckingham. He stood for the Rejoin EU party at the 2021 [London Assembly election], and for Kensington and Bayswater in the 2024 general election. He was the candidate for the party in the 2025 [Runcorn and Helsby by-election].