[5] Lady Body was a friend and Bletchley Park colleague of Valerie Middleton, the grandmother of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.
[3] In January 1973, Body was an opponent of Prime Minister Edward Heath's Counter-Inflation Bill, stating that the real cause of inflation was too much government spending.
Within the Tory party his doubts were shared by Enoch Powell, Ronald Bell and Nicholas Ridley, the last of whom complained that what was needed was a "proper economic policy".
[7] Rural Buckinghamshire-born, and representing fertile South Holland, Body was an early supporter of environmental causes within the Conservative Party.
He made such views clear in March 2001, shortly before he retired as an MP, writing in the parliamentary magazine The House that the rural and, specifically, the agricultural communities of Britain were the victims of major changes to the culture at Westminster in his time in the Commons, as the number of Tory MPs from landowning or farming backgrounds had declined and the number of self-made men from the suburbs on the Tory benches had increased.
[9] The incident prompted Cabinet Secretary Robin Butler to warn Channel 4 head Michael Grade against any further calls for fear that state secrets could be inadvertently leaked.
Unlike the vast majority of Conservative MPs, Body voted to equalise the age of consent for homosexuals, and also supported the legalisation of cannabis.
[13] On 10 November 1999, Body put forward an Early Day Motion in support of the writer Robert Henderson,[14] who believed that the security services had interfered with his mail and telephone line after he had written allegedly threatening letters to Prime Minister Tony Blair, his wife Cherie, and various Labour MPs.