Back in 2006 a political activist named Simon Richards co-founded Better Off Out, a right-wing pressure group that wanted Britain to leave the European Union.
At the time, he and his colleagues were told they were wasting their time. They were seen as something not far short of a lunatic fringe, even by the majority of eurosceptic Conservatives who reckoned reform of the EU was the most they could hope for.
But Richards persevered. In 2008 he became director of The Freedom Association, a libertarian campaign group that had recently been left a £300,000 legacy, and he devoted that money to the cause. He organised debates. He set up “Freedom Zones” on the edge of Conservative Party conferences to discuss controversial subjects banned by the Tory hierarchy. He held annual “Freedom Festivals” in Bournemouth at which Conservatives and members of Nigel Farage’s Ukip, forerunner to today’s Reform Party, would meet and share ideas.
Gradually the idea of Britain leaving the EU gained support until, in 2015, David Cameron called for a referendum on the issue, primarily to try and end the divide within the Conservative Party and ward off Ukip. Richards campaigned across the country, giving speeches, raising money and even diverting funds to Labour Party eurosceptics.
On June 23, 2016, Britain voted for Brexit. Richards was vindicated. Elated, he waved a Union flag and flashed a Churchillian V sign outside the entrance to Downing Street the next morning. It was the proudest moment of his life, though he subsequently felt let down by what he regarded as the failure of Theresa May, Boris Johnson and other political leaders to reap Brexit’s benefits.
Richards was an engaging character — warm, jovial, courteous and a tad eccentric. Stocky, ruddy and balding with a remnant of fly-away hair, his appearance was described by a fellow eurosceptic activist as that of a “slightly scruffy country gent”.
He never married. He never drove, always preferring public transport. And he never made much money. Richards loved museums, tea rooms, churches, cathedrals, pubs, croquet and cricket, sometimes taking the ingredients for making Eton mess to Test matches.
He also revered Margaret Thatcher, calling her a “magnificent prime minister” who “made people feel proud to be British again”, and a lifelong campaigner for “freedom” as he saw it.
He joined The Freedom Association as a schoolboy in 1976, the year after it was founded by the twins Norris and Ross McWhirter, publishers of the Guinness Book of Records.
Back then its principal goal was to curb excessive trade union power, and one commentator dubbed it “Thatcherism’s extra-parliamentary advance guard against a fading Labour government and its union allies”.
Richards stayed with it as it campaigned for the right of England cricketers to play in apartheid-era South Africa in the 1980s. Much later, as its director then chief executive, he launched an “Axe the TV Tax” campaign to abolish the BBC licence fee, saying the broadcaster was “wasteful, biased and has lost touch with reality”.
Under his leadership The Freedom Association opposed plans for national ID cards and demanded reform of libel laws which, it argued, inhibited free speech. It campaigned against government measures to discourage smoking, or what Richards described as an “endless barrage of new controls, directives and diktats”. It launched a “Freedom to Vape” campaign against restrictions imposed by the EU. It fought for the right to protest peacefully outside abortion clinics.
Richards also fought for a statue of Thatcher to be erected in Grantham, the Lincolnshire town where she was born and raised.
Richards was a key supporter of the erection of a statue of Margaret Thatcher in Grantham
ALAMY
He was more of an organiser than a public face, a builder of alliances who took particular pleasure in mentoring young libertarians. He was once described as “the nicest man in politics”, one who preferred to reason than rant, but his mild manners concealed an inner steeliness.
He loathed Edward Heath, John Major and any other Conservatives who, in his view, contributed to Thatcher’s downfall. He regarded May as a “socialist” and lamented Johnson’s failure to exploit what he regarded as Britain’s new-found freedom after Brexit. Conversely, he greatly admired Farage and said he deserved a knighthood for restoring Britain’s sovereignty.
Simon Timothy Richards was born in Cardiff in 1958, the third of four children of two GPs, Michael and Margot. He was educated at The Cathedral School’s prep school in Llandaff, and said his first political memory was the funeral in 1965 of Sir Winston Churchill — “the last great world leader we had”. He went on Shrewsbury School, and in his final year there he joined The Freedom Association.
At King’s College, London, he read history and immersed himself in politics. He joined the Federation of Conservative Students, helped to persuade the student union to disaffiliate from the left-leaning National Union of Students, and was heavily influenced by Sir Keith Joseph, who was busily developing Thatcher’s programme for government: he was “like John the Baptist … he was preaching the gospel of freedom and free enterprise”.
On one occasion Richards hosted the right-wing Conservative MP Rhodes Boyson at a meeting that was attacked by left-wing students from the nearby London School of Economics.
To the irritation of his father, who wanted him to get a proper job, he stayed on at King’s for a year after graduating to serve as union secretary, then found a job with British Home Stores that took him to Liverpool, London and finally Cheltenham where he ran the store’s lighting department.
He then set up his own lighting shop in Cheltenham, The Light Brigade, which sold only lights and lamps made by British craftsmen. After it went bust in the recession of the early 1990s, he ran the gift shop in the Cheltenham Museum and began editing the Freedom Association’s newsletter, Freedom Today.
By 2008 he was The Freedom Association’s director, and by 2014 its chief executive — a post he held until his retirement in 2020.
Richards moved from Cheltenham to Newark last year, in part to be near Grantham. He volunteered as a guide at Grantham’s museum and was planning to lead Thatcher-themed tours of the town at the time of his sudden death. He is thought to have suffered a heart attack shortly after watching Scotland beat his native Wales in the Six Nations.
Simon Richards, political activist, was born on June 23, 1958. He died of a suspected heart attack on February 21, 2026, aged 67