Michael Fabricant

Sir Michael Louis David Fabricant (born 12 June 1950) is a British politician.

Fabricant was born in Rottingdean, Brighton on 12 June 1950, into a Jewish family, to Helena (née Freed; 1911–2004) and Rabbi Isaac Fabricant (1906–1989), rabbi of the Brighton and Hove Synagogue.

Fabricant attended Brighton Secondary Technical School and Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School.

He studied economics at Loughborough University, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree.

He went on to study at the University of Sussex, where he was awarded a master's degree in operations research in 1974, and undertook research at the University of Oxford, University of London, and the University of Southern California in economics and econometrics.

He was director and co-founder of an international broadcast manufacturing and management group for 11 years prior to his election to Parliament.

He responded that he had several flags on display from countries where his former company had clients in the 1980s.

Fabricant unsuccessfully contested the safe Labour stronghold of South Shields at the 1987 general election, coming in 13,851 votes behind victor David Clark.

Fabricant was appointed the chairman of the Brighton Pavilion Conservative Association in 1990 and remained chairman until his election to the House of Commons.

A member of the Conservative Party, he has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Lichfield in Staffordshire, formerly Mid Staffordshire, since 1992.

Fabricant was first elected at the 1992 general election for Mid Staffordshire (which included the city of Lichfield), regaining the seat for the Conservatives following Sylvia Heal's gaining the seat for Labour at the 1990 by-election.

He took the seat with a majority of 6,236 and has remained an MP since.

He made his maiden speech on 2 July 1992.

In Parliament, Fabricant joined the European Legislation Select Committee in 1992, and served on it until the 1997 general election.

He joined the National Heritage Select Committee in 1993 and was a member of that committee until his appointment as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury Michael Jack in 1996.

The Mid Staffordshire seat was abolished at the 1997 general election, but Fabricant contested and won the Lichfield constituency, which was the main seat to replace it, by just 238 votes (0.51%).

Following the Conservative defeat at the 1997 general election, Fabricant joined the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee until moving to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 1999.

He has remained the Lichfield MP since, progressively increasing his majority to 4,426 in 2001, 7,080 in 2005, 17,683 in 2010, 18,189 in 2015, 18,581 in 2017 and 23,638 in 2019.

He rejoined the Culture, Media and Sport committee following the 2001 general election, and also at this time became the chairman of the Information Committee.

He moved up to the opposition frontbench as a trade and industry spokesman under Michael Howard in 2003.

Later in the year he was moved to the post of spokesman on economic affairs.

He became an opposition whip following the 2005 general election and remained in the position following the appointment of new leader David Cameron.

In 2008, Fabricant founded Conservative Friends of America.

In November 2012, Fabricant published a pamphlet entitled "The Pact", which called for a political pact between UKIP and the Conservative Party, in exchange for an In/out EU referendum.

In April 2014, he was dismissed from this position over comments he had made about his colleague Maria Miller's resignation.

Fabricant was the vice-chairman of the Conservative Party for parliamentary campaigning, responsible for the Conservative Campaign Headquarters strategy on marginal seats at the 2015 general election, as well as UK parliamentary by-elections.

In the 2016 EU Referendum campaign Fabricant said he would be voting to leave the EU.

A staunch believer in free trade, he commented: "I think we are part of a global economy and that we will be far wealthier trading globally than the current situation".

Fabricant has taken part in a series of adjournment debates on government funding for inland waterways, and has called for heavy goods freight to move off Britain's roads and back onto the restored canal network.

In the House of Commons, he sits on the Administration Committee and has previously sat on the Committee of Selection, the Finance and Services Committee, the Liaison Committee (Commons), the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the Home Affairs Committee and the National Heritage Committee.

Fabricant was sacked as vice-chairman of the Conservative Party after he tweeted "about time" with regard to Maria Miller's resignation as cabinet minister.

George Eaton of the New Statesman believed his sacking related to his threat to rebel over the HS2 rail development and was necessary to deter other potential Conservative rebels on the same issue.

He opposes HS2 on the grounds of its financial and environmental cost.

In a 2016 debate, Fabricant yelled "bollocks" over a discussion of the impacts of Brexit.

He was expressing disagreement with the former justice minister Jonathan Djanogly's statement that UK law firms could lose £1.7 billion in earnings if the UK were to leave the European Union.

Fabricant wrote in The Guardian in November 2017 to rebut claims about him that had appeared on a Westminster dossier making assertions about the behaviour of Conservative MPs. He wrote that no one he had contacted, including lobby journalists and a former chief whip with an "elephantine memory", had previously heard the claim made against him of "inappropriate behaviour with a male journalist in a taxi".

Fabricant attracted media attention for having an apartheid-era flag of South Africa on display on the mantelpiece of his parliamentary office.

Asked in 2018 if he regretted working for what was effectively an arm of the apartheid state in South Africa, he replied: "There is so much we can all regret with hindsight" and said he did not condone what was going on at the time.

On 12 April 2022, Fabricant urged Boris Johnson to apologise after he was fined for a breach of Covid rules.

Fabricant said: "I don't think at any time he thought he was breaking the law. I think that at the time he just thought like many teachers and nurses who after a very long shift would tend to go back to the staff room and have a quiet drink".