James Elles

James Edmund Moncrieff Elles (born 3 September 1949 in London) is a former Conservative Party Member of the European Parliament for South East England.

Elles is the son of Diana Newcombe Elles, Baroness Elles and her husband, Neil Patrick Moncrieff Elles. He served as the MEP for Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire from 1984 to 1989 and the MEP for Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire East from 1989 to 1999. He then represented the South East in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2014. Elles had special responsibility for the Conservative Party for the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.

He was educated at Eton College and the University of Edinburgh where he graduated with a BSc in agriculture. He became a European MP after an eight-year career as a civil servant with the European Commission, initially as a Tokyo Round negotiator and latterly as Assistant to the Deputy Director General of Agriculture.

Elles served six terms in the European Parliament, his principal Committee being the Budgets Committee for the whole 30-year period. He was overall rapporteur on the EU budget for the years 1996 and 2007. He was also a substitute member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Budget Control Committee during this period. He founded the Thames Valley European Forum, now renamed the South East Conservative European Network (SECEN) of which he is currently Chairman.

In 1992 he founded the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN). The purpose of TPN is to help build bridges between the EU and US involving business and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic, feeding in ideas, for example, to create the new transatlantic agenda (NTA) in 1995 and, more, recently putting forward suggestions to strengthen transatlantic partnership through the completion of the transatlantic market from 2008 onwards. This has now led to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment partnership (TTIP) under negotiation between the EU and the U.S. since February 2013. He is currently Chairman of the Network.

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