Nick Budgen

By Chris Pitt

It would never happen now. But it happened on the afternoon of Saturday, August 3, 1968. Alongside cricket, rowing, athletics and a preview of the following day’s German Grand Prix – Jackie Stewart, driving with a broken wrist, won it by a margin of four minutes in what is widely considered to be one of the greatest victories in the history of Formula One – BBC Radio 3’s Sports programme broadcast three races from Newton Abbot on the opening day of the 1968/69 National Hunt season. Peter Bromley was in the commentator’s box and called the 3.05, 3.40 and 4.15 races.

The last of that trio, the two-mile Halwill Novices’ Chase, had an odds-on favourite in Rugantino, the mount of Josh Gifford. They duly obliged by four lengths. Back in second place was the 100-7 rank outsider of the six-runner field, a horse named Mr Woodpecker, owned, trained and ridden by Mr Nicholas Budgen. 

Named after St. Nicholas Church in Newport, Shropshire, where his grandfather was priest, owner-trainer-rider Nicholas Budgen was born on November 3, 1937, in Oxford. He was baptised at Lichfield Cathedral by his grandfather, who had also baptised politician Enoch Powell, whom Nicholas (or Nick, as more popularly known) would later succeed as the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West. 

Nick was raised by his grandfather after his father had been killed during the Second World War. He was educated at St Edward’s School in Oxford and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.  

During his National Service he rose to the rank of Lieutenant in the North Staffordshire Regiment. In 1959 he transferred to the Staffordshire Yeomanry. He became a barrister at Gray’s Inn in 1962. 

Following that debut second-place finish at Newton Abbot, Nick rode Mr Woodpecker in six more races over the next two months, finishing second three times and third once, but never quite managing to gain that elusive first win. 

It came eventually for the bespectacled owner-trainer rider but not until two years later and not on Mr Woodpecker. Instead, it came on another of his horses, Vedic, in a four-runner novice chase at Cartmel on Bank Holiday Monday, August 31, 1970. 

Based at Netherstowe House, Lichfield, Nick trained two or three horses and rode them in races. His colours were black, red cap with white hoop. In February 1971 he twice rode his ten-year-old mare Jocelin to victory, landing a Market Rasen maiden chase and a Stratford novice chase. Jocelin went on to become the dam of Fred Winter’s good steeplechaser Brown Chamberlin, winner of the 1983 Hennessy Cognac Gold Cup.  

Nick rode just one more winner, Line Of Sparks in a Uttoxeter novices’ chase on Easter Monday, April 23, 1973. The following year, six weeks before the 1974 general election, he was selected to stand for the Conservatives as MP for Wolverhampton South West, following the resignation of Enoch Powell, who had left the party over their policy on the EEC. 

In 1981 Nick was made a Conservative whip. However, he resigned as a whip the following year over his opposition to the creation of a Northern Ireland Assembly with no government powers. In 1984 The Spectator magazine voted him their Backbencher of the Year. 

He was also opposed to immigration to the UK and on October 10, 1989, at the Conservative Party Conference, he, along with fellow MP Tim Inman, addressed a controversial fringe meeting organized by the Young Monday Club, advertised as ‘The End of the English? - Immigration and Repatriation’. 

In the early 1990s he was one of the ‘whipless eight’, the Maastricht Rebels, leading former Prime Minister Edward Heath to describe them as “a party within a party”. It was Nick who, in 1993, first mooted the idea of a referendum on the European Single Currency, with his proposed European Currency (Referendum) Bill.

Outside of politics, Nick was keen on hunting and claimed to have hunted in 29 of the UK’s counties. He also wrote regularly for Horse and Hound and occasionally for the Wall Street Journal, The Times, Glasgow Herald and The Irish Times. 

I met Nick Budgen once, during an election campaign, when I was working in Wolverhampton. It was a public event that involved him meeting people from his constituency. At the end of the evening, after he’d answered a variety of questions about government policy, coupled with local issues such as parking, crime and having a greater police presence on the streets, and so forth, I went up to him and said: “Here’s a question you wouldn’t have expected tonight. Whatever became of Mr Woodpecker?”

His eyes lit up. Suddenly, he was transported back from the mundane world of politics to a time when he was doing something he loved. I told him I remembered listening to the Newton Abbot race on Radio 3 and we chatted about that and about Jocelin too. I’m not that much of a political animal but he came across as a genuinely good bloke. 

All too sadly, Nicholas Budgen did not live long enough to recall those amateur rider exploits for any great length of time. He died of liver cancer at Stafford General Hospital on October 26, 1998, aged 60. His funeral took place at Lichfield Cathedral. A memorial service was held at St Margaret's Church, Westminster.