Richard Cottrell

Richard Cottrell enjoyed a long career in the British print and broadcast media. As a television journalist specialising in politics and economics he contributed regularly to the national ITV network. He correctly predicted why the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic plane would fail. 

In 1979 he was elected as a Conservative in the first direct elections to the European Parliament. Over the next ten years he sat on the parliament’s important committees and published two books, one a polemical attack on the EU’s farming policy (The Sacred Cow) and another (Blood on Their Hands) which extended the inquiry he performed on behalf of the parliament into the murder of  British journalist Ann Chapman under the military junta in Greece.  His inquiry cleared an innocent man.

 He wrote the highly praised landmark Cottrell Report into the activities of pseudo religious cults such as the Moonies and their harmful influences on families and society.

 Richard entered politics as an enthusiastic European but turned agnostic “as a result of experience of the inner workings of a profoundly anti-democratic system.”

 After Europe he worked as a political advisor to international corporations looking to invest in the European countries queuing to join the EU, notably Poland.

 He is married to Diana, who is Polish. They have two daughters. He is the author of Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe