Tom Sackville

Thomas Geoffrey Sackville (born 26 October 1950) is a British Conservative politician.

Family and early life

Tom Sackville is the second son of William Sackville, 10th Earl De La Warr (d. February 1988) and Anne Rachel Devas, and his brother is William Herbrand Sackville, the 11th Earl De La Warr.

In 1979, he married Catherine Thérèsa Windsor-Lewis, daughter of Brigadier James Charles Windsor-Lewis. They have two children, Arthur Michael Sackville (b. 1983) and Savannah Elizabeth Sackville (b. 1986), both adopted.

He was educated at Eton College and Lincoln College, Oxford, and began his professional career in merchant banking.

Parliamentary career

Sackville first ran for Parliament in the constituency of Pontypool in the 1979 election, being beaten by Labour's Leo Abse.

He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament for Bolton West from the 1983 election until he was defeated by Ruth Kelly in the 1997 election. He held the office of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State between 1992 and 1997, initially for the Department of Health, then as a Home Office minister between 1995 and 1997.

Work against cults

In 1985 he started All-Party Committee Against Cults and 20 October 2000 he became first chairman of The Family Survival Trust (formerly Family Action Information Resource, FAIR), an anti-cult organisation.

In 1997 he ended government funding for the independent research group Information Network Focus on Religious Movements (Inform). Funds were reinstated in 2000. In his article for The Spectator (2004) he accused INFORM and its president Eileen Barker of "refusing to criticise the worst excesses of cult leaders", and congratulated the Archbishop of Canterbury for declining to become a patron of INFORM. The allegations were described by INFORM as unfounded.

In 2005 he was elected as Vice-President of European Federation of Centres of Research and Information on Sectarianism (FECRIS), an umbrella organization for anti-cult groups in Europe, and from 2009 he has served as its President.

Sackville is the current CEO of the International Federation of Health Plans.