Julian Murray Lewis

Career

He was a graduate student at St Antony's College, Oxford, in 1977 when he first attracted attention in the media by campaigning on behalf of Reg Prentice, a right-wing Labour Minister facing the loss of his seat at Newham North-East as a result of left-wing manipulations.

By the early 1980s, Lewis was running an organisation – called The Coalition for Peace Through Security – from a walk-up office in Whitehall. Financed by various right-wing private organisations in Britain and in the United States, the Coalition's function, Lewis says, was "to counter unilateralist propaganda". One way he set about this was to assemble massive dossiers on leading members of CND, purporting to show that many had been associated with the Communist Party or various Communist fronts.

By 1984, cruise and Pershing II missiles had been deployed, and the threat from CND had receded. Lewis became involved in a number of other causes, for example, supporting the revolt led by Lord Beloff in the House of Lords and Edward Leigh (Conservative MP for Gainsborough and Horncastle) on secret union ballots.

Lewis set up a political consultancy with Leigh and Tony Kerpel, a former assistant to Edward Heath, now a political adviser to the Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker. The consultancy was called Policy Research Associates, and one of its projects was called the Media Monitoring Unit. With immense labour, in November 1986, a colleague of Lewis's, Simon Clark, working in a flat in Holland Park Avenue, published his first Media Monitoring Report.

Career History

1979-82: Seaman 1985-89: Director, Policy Research Associates 1990-96: Deputy director, Conservative research department 1995-96: Director, CCO media monitoring unit