Bravo, Julian Lewis!

A headline I would have had no conception of writing when he effectively presided over a public meeting for the Conservative party during the 1970 general election campaign. In the audience, as a voter in Swansea East (though as yet politically inactive because of my civil service post) I put a question to the candidate Michael J Murphy. I questioned the feasibility of the Heath manifesto's proposed anti-trade union legislation. I predicted that if the established trade unions were legally emasculated, then unofficial action would lead to industrial anarchy. Lewis took over and harangued me for what must have been five minutes hardly drawing breath. Looking back, it was an impressive performance for an eighteen-year-old,  though I took him for a 20-something Central Office apparatchik at the time. I don't remember what he said though I regarded it at the time as dishonestly failing to answer the question. (In the event, the Conservatives won the election but the TU legislation had to be abandoned because the public and the judiciary revolted at the effects of using the criminal law to sanction strike action.)

Since then, the antipathy grew as he revealed himself to be generally illiberal, bellicose and against the European Union. He has consistently voted for a Trident replacement and one suspects he is itching to use it against China.

But there is one issue on which I fall in behind him, and that is the UK's unpreparedness for conventional warfare. Our lead in electronic intelligence-gathering is also under threat due to Treasury penny-pinching, as a former chairman of the defence select committee, Rory Stewart complained. The transparent attempt to have Johnson stooge and failed minister Chris Grayling voted in as chair of the intelligence and security select committee (ISC) was the final straw for Dr Lewis. According to BBC parliamentary correspondents, he persuaded a majority of the ISC including Labour members to vote for him instead of Grayling. The reaction of Johnson was not to accept this outbreak of parliamentary democracy but to petulantly have his party withdraw the whip from Dr Lewis.

So, MPs have shown that they are not simply rubber-stamps for the Johnson-Cummings dictatorship. Moreover, there seems now no reason why the long-delayed report on Russian involvement in our elections should not be published.