Bill Cash profile

Eurosceptic grandee

When Bill Cash entered parliament, Rishi Sunak was just three years old. Four decades on, Cash, at 83 the oldest member of the Commons, is a deeply establishment figure but also someone who has caused trouble for political leaders – from John Major as one of the “bastards” during the Maastricht treaty era to Theresa May in the battles over her EU withdrawal bill.

Sunak is the latest target of Cash’s so-called “star chamber” – a grandly titled group named after the unaccountable Stuart court of common-law judges and privy councillors that met in Westminster until 1641.

The original star chamber, a symbol of arbitrary and oppressive power, could impose any punishment short of death – from whipping to the excision of ears. The modern incarnation of the group is less terrifying, merely a self-appointed group of Eurosceptic lawyers led by Cash that publishes its own legal opinions. But it is still capable of striking fear into the hearts of prime ministers – with verdicts such as the view on Monday that Sunak’s Rwanda bill was not “watertight” against challenges on human rights grounds.

Cash was born during the second world war and his father, Capt Paul Cash, died during the D-day invasion when his son was four. He studied at Stonyhurst college, a Catholic public school in Lancashire, and then read history at Oxford University before qualifying as a lawyer in 1967, specialising in constitutional and administrative law. He entered parliament in 1984 for Stafford and from 1997 for the seat of Stone. He still runs a firm of solicitors from his home called William Cash & Co.

His parliamentary career has never involved a government job, but he spent several years as a shadow attorney general under Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership of the party. As a backbencher during the Major and later the Cameron and May years, Cash had the opportunity to fight for his obsessive cause – Euroscepticism and, as he saw it, restoring sovereignty to the UK.

Colleagues regard him as courteous but one former adviser said he was “rather tedious” and prone to relentlessly “banging on about Europe” – as Cameron once urged his party not to do.