Julian Murray Lewis

Julian Murray Lewis (born 26 September 1951) is the Conservative MP for New Forest East. He has described himself as a 'counter-subversion propagandist'.

Counter subversion and infiltration

Lewis first came to public prominence by infiltrating the Labour Party:

Lewis gained notoriety when he and a fellow graduate student infiltrated Newham [North-East] Labour Party in support of Reg Prentice, restoring the party to "moderate" control, only to discover their hero removing himself to the Tory Party... He said his tactic was to adopt Leftist methods and to be "as committed as they are". He sees the unilateralists of today as the direct descendants of the appeasers of the 1930s. "Joe McCarthy has a lot to answer for, giving anti-Communism a bad name," he said.

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

Compiled from public sources.

• Circa 1977-1978 member of the Labour Party in Newham North East.
• 1979-82: Seaman
• Early 1980s Coalition for Peace Through Security
• 1985-89: Director, Policy Research Associates, which set up the Media Monitoring Unit
• 1990-96: Deputy director, Conservative research department
• 1995-96: Director, CCO media monitoring unit
• February 1996, selected to be prospective Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for the new seat of New Forest East.
• May 1997 elected to Parliament, and re-elected in June 2001, May 2005 and May 2010.
• February 2000, appointed as one of the three Conservative Members of the Select Committee on Defence. The following month he was elected Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee and European Affairs Committee, in succession to the late Michael Colvin.
• September 2001 joined front bench as an Opposition Whip.
• November 2002 - September 2004 Shadow Defence Minister for the Royal Navy, the nuclear deterrent and strategic issues.
• September 2004 - May 2005 General Election - Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office
• May 2005 until May 2010, Shadow Defence Minister for the Royal Navy, the nuclear deterrent and strategic issues.
• September 2010, appointed to the Intelligence and Security Committee

Affiliations

• All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia
• Tackling Terrorism All-Party Parliamentary Group, member