John Ryman
British politician (1930-2009)
John Ryman QC (7 November 1930 – 3 May 2009) was a British Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) who sat as an independent MP for his last year in the House of Commons, who was later convicted of fraud.
Ryman was educated at Leighton Park School, Reading, and Pembroke College, Oxford. Ryman was a barrister and a fox-hunter. He was elected MP for Blyth in the October 1974 general election, ousting the incumbent Eddie Milne (who had been re-elected as an Independent Labour MP at the February 1974 election after being deselected as the official Labour candidate). In 1976 he was fined £400 in under the Representation of the People Act 1949 and the Perjury Act 1911 for falsifying his election expenses return and overspending, although the election result stood.
In a close Parliament, Ryman's frequent absences from Parliament (either to continue his legal work or for other reasons) tried the patience of the whips. On one celebrated occasion the Chief Whip Bob Mellish went on the radio to ask listeners to get in touch if they had spotted him.
When the German Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt urged the Labour Party to support British membership of the EEC, Ryman responded with "Why should this patronising Hun lecture the British Labour Party?"
Ryman held off a strong challenge from Milne in the 1979 general election, holding his seat with a majority of over 7,000. The constituency was renamed Blyth Valley for the 1983 general election, when the newly formed Social Democratic Party (SDP) cut his majority to 3,243. In 1986, he announced that he was leaving the Labour Party and sat as an independent until he retired at the 1987 general election.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “John Ryman” as british politician (1930-2009). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6256142. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1930, 2009, 1974 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Ryman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.