Clive Lewis (politician)

Lewis was selected as the Labour Party's prospective parliamentary candidate for Norwich South at the party's hustings in November 2011, beating other candidates including the musician Dave Rowntree. Norwich South had been won by Simon Wright of the Liberal Democrats in the 2010 general election with a majority of just over 300 votes, defeating former Home Secretary and Education Secretary Charles Clarke.[15]

In April 2015, during an interview by the New Statesman, in response to a question on whether he was taking his upcoming victory for granted, he said he would only lose if "he was caught with [his] pants down behind a goat with Ed Miliband at the other end". He subsequently apologised for the remark, saying he was "sincerely sorry" "if" anyone had been offended by the comment.[16]

Lewis opposed the Labour Party's position on immigration.[17] Locally, Lewis supported the campaign to prevent the Hewett School, a comprehensive school in Norwich, from being turned into an academy.[18]

On 7 May 2015, Lewis was elected MP for Norwich South with a 15.8% majority of 7,654.[1] Lewis, in his victory speech, declared New Labour to be "dead and buried" and promised to stand up for Norwich's most vulnerable against an "onslaught of cuts" by the governing Conservative Party.[19]

In June 2015, Lewis was elected Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group.[20][21] In the same month, he became a patron of the Anti-Academies Alliance.[22]

Lewis was one of 36 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn as a candidate in the 2015 Labour leadership election.[23] Corbyn credited Lewis with getting his nominations "off the ground".[24][25] Lewis has been described as an ally of Corbyn, who was elected leader.[26] In September 2015, he was appointed to the Labour frontbench as a shadow minister in the Energy and Climate Change team.[27]

Lewis speaking at the 2016 Labour Party Conference

Following resignations from Corbyn's shadow cabinet after the 2016 EU referendum, Lewis was appointed as shadow defence secretary.[28] In September 2016, at the Labour Party's 2016 Conference, when Lewis was preparing to give his first speech as shadow defence secretary, a section of his speech announcing that he "would not seek to change" Labour's current policy on nuclear weapons was changed by Corbyn's communications advisor Seumas Milne. Lewis was informed of the change by a sticky note.[29][30] A month later, Corbyn removed Lewis from the defence brief, replacing him with Nia Griffith. Lewis was then appointed as shadow business secretary. The move was viewed as a tactical demotion.[31]

On 8 February 2017, Lewis resigned from the shadow cabinet, citing the Labour Party's decision to whip its MPs to vote to trigger Article 50 to start Brexit negotiations.[32]

In April 2017, Lewis was one of thirteen MPs to vote against triggering the 2017 general election.[33] At the subsequent election, he was re-elected with a majority of 30.4 per cent.[34]

Video footage, taken at a fringe event at the 2017 Labour Conference, emerged in which Lewis told the actor Sam Swann to "get on your knees, bitch". Lewis' language attracted criticism from Labour colleague, but Swann later described the situation as "jovial". Stella Creasy, a Labour colleague, said: "It's not OK. Even if it's meant as a joke, it reinforces menace that men have the physical power to force compliance." Swann told The Guardian: "It is clearly jovial and nothing vicious. Swann also said "The whole event was so brilliant for seeing MPs letting their hair down and fucking around with people who support them. I think Clive Lewis is an absolute legend." Lewis subsequently tweeted an apology, in which he described his behaviour as "offensive and unacceptable".[35]

Lewis was also accused of groping a woman at Momentum's The World Transformed event at the same conference.[36] In response, Lewis said he was "pretty taken aback" by the accusation and "completely" and "categorically" denied it.[37] On 12 December 2017, he was cleared by Labour's National Executive Committee sexual harassment panel.[38]

In January 2018, Lewis was reappointed to Labour's shadow frontbench as a shadow Treasury minister, responsible for sustainable economics.[39][40]

Lewis supported Labour activist Marc Wadsworth, who was expelled from the party in April 2018 for bringing it into disrepute. Wadsworth had accused Jewish Labour MP Ruth Smeeth of working "hand in hand" with the media at the launch of the Chakrabarti report into anti-Semitism in the party.[41] Lewis, who had provided a character reference for Wadsworth, [42] opposed the decision to expel him.[43] Jewish students at the University of East Anglia, in Lewis's constituency, criticised him for his stance, whilst the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) issued an open letter to Lewis, who they believed had "categorically failed" Jewish people.[44][45]

At the 2019 Labour conference, Lewis published a paper which accused the party of a "moral failure" on migrants' rights and called for the party to adopt an open border immigration policy. He also accused party leader Jeremy Corbyn of being "silent on detention centres" and the "no recourse to public funds" policy of the Conservative government.[46]

In the 2019 general election, Lewis was returned with a reduced majority of 24.7%.[47]

In December 2019, he announced that he would run in the 2020 Labour Party leadership election following Corbyn's resignation.[48] Despite a petition by members and supporters to get him on the ballot due to his democratisation and electoral reform policies, he received only five of the necessary 22 nominations from Labour MPs, and withdrew from the contest, which allowed his five supporters to nominate other candidates before nominations closed on 13 January.[49]

A few days before Liz Truss became prime minister in September 2022, Lewis said that the government had the power to address the United Kingdom cost of living crisis through measures such as: a windfall tax, nationalisation of energy companies, implementing retrofits of homes, and establishing a universal basic income and universal basic services. He said such things would not be implemented under Truss because, "it will not favour the private interests who are benefiting from the cost of living crisis, such as the funders of dark money think tanks that appear to be driving the incoming Truss government's agenda."[50]

In September 2022, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Lewis wrote an article criticising the monarchy and the "flawed reality of the very limited democracy we inhabit". Lewis stated that he despaired at the queues to see Queen's coffin and noted that the royal succession "is as much about coercion as consent". He also criticised the language of "duty" and "sacrifice" used about the royal family which he said to be a lie and he called for constitutional, democratic reform. In the title of the article he referred to himself as a republican.[51][52]