Brigadier General Geoffrey Charles Van Orden CBE was formerly leader of the UK Conservatives in the European Parliament, having been a military intelligence officer for 3 decades. From the time of his first election as Member of the European Parliament in 1999 until the UK’s departure from the EU in 2020, he was a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He became its Vice Chairman, a member of the Defence Committee and Vice Chairman of the Special Committee on Terrorism. He chaired both the Delegation for Relations with India and the Friends of Sri Lanka Group, and was a long-standing member of the Turkey-EU Joint Parliamentary Committee. He is a Member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).