Clive Lewis

Clive Anthony Lewis (born 11 September 1971) is a British Labour politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Norwich South since the 2015 general election.

Clive Antony Lewis was born in London on 11 September 1971.

He grew up on a council estate in Northampton, the son of a single father, his father is from Grenada and his mother from England.

He was the first member of his family to attend university, studying economics at the University of Bradford before being elected student union president, and later vice-president of the National Union of Students (NUS).

In November 1995, he was a signatory to a letter that argued for the abolition of student loans.

Lewis was suspended from the role of vice-president of the NUS in 1996 by its president, Jim Murphy, for publicly supporting concerns about tuition fees.

Murphy's actions were condemned by Ken Livingstone, then a Labour MP.

Lewis ran for president of the National Union of Students in 1996 on a platform of unfunded full grants and free education, and lost the election to Douglas Trainer.

After completing a post-graduate diploma in journalism, Lewis worked on local newspapers in Northampton and Milton Keynes, and was then accepted into the BBC's News Trainee Scheme.

He went on to work as a broadcast journalist in Nottingham, Norwich, and Coventry.

He then became the main reporter on the BBC's Politics Show East.

Lewis joined the Territorial Army, passing out of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2006 as an infantry officer with The Rifles.

Lewis also served a three-month tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2009.

In 2009, he served a three-month tour of duty in Afghanistan.

In an opinion piece he wrote years later, Lewis said "despite being on the left, and despite being told in the cadets that 'there ain't no black in the union jack', I still opted to serve".

Shortly after returning from his tour of duty, he experienced depression, saying "I just felt like I was being crushed by it all."

He receiving counselling through the Ministry of Defence and recovered.

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.

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.

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.

Lewis opposed the Labour Party's position on immigration.

Locally, Lewis supported the campaign to prevent the Hewett School, a comprehensive school in Norwich, from being turned into an academy.

At the 2015 general election, Lewis was elected MP for Norwich South with a majority of 7,654, and 39.3% of the vote.

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.

In June 2015, Lewis was elected Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group.

In the same month, he became a patron of the Anti-Academies Alliance.

Lewis was one of 36 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn as a candidate in the 2015 Labour leadership election.

Corbyn credited Lewis with getting his nominations "off the ground".

Lewis has been described as an ally of Corbyn, who was elected leader.

In September 2015, he was appointed to the Labour frontbench as a shadow minister in the Energy and Climate Change team.

He became shadow defence secretary in June 2016, and shadow business secretary in October 2016.

Following resignations from Corbyn's shadow cabinet after the 2016 EU referendum, Lewis was appointed as shadow defence secretary.

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.

Lewis left the Shadow Cabinet in 2017 in protest over the Labour Party's decision to whip its MPs into voting to trigger Article 50, but re-joined the front bench a year later as shadow minister for sustainable economics.

Lewis was a candidate for Leader of the Labour Party in the 2020 leadership election.

He is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group parliamentary caucus.

He previously served as vice-president of the National Union of Students, worked as a TV reporter for BBC News and served as an infantry officer with the Territorial Army.

Lewis stood in the 2020 Labour Party leadership election, but did not receive the required 22 parliamentarian nominations, and withdrew.