Ivan Lewis (born 4 March 1967) is a British politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Bury South from 1997 to 2019, initially as a member of the Labour Party then as an independent from 2017.
After serving in various ministerial positions, including Foreign Affairs, International Development, Education and Health under Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 2001 to 2010, Lewis was Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport until October 2011, when he was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for International Development. In the October 2013 Shadow Cabinet reshuffle, he became Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Following Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader in September 2015, Lewis was dismissed from the shadow cabinet.
Lewis was suspended from the Labour Party in November 2017 after sexual misconduct allegations. He resigned from the Labour Party in December 2018, citing his concerns about antisemitism in the party and the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Lewis sat as an independent MP until the 2019 General Election, when he stood as an independent candidate in Bury South. During the campaign Lewis urged voters to support the Conservatives rather than himself when it became clear his candidature could allow Labour to win and inadvertently boost Corbyn's chances of becoming prime minister.
Lewis also served as a Councillor on Bury Metropolitan Borough Council for the Sedgley ward, being elected in 1990 at 23 years of age and held the position of Chairman of the Social Services Committee.
Between June 2001 and June 2002, Lewis was the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Young People and Learning within the Department for Education and Skills and then for Adult Learning and Skills. From June 2002 to May 2005, he became Under-Secretary of State for Skills and Vocational Education in the same department.
As a junior minister Lewis was responsible for the White Paper 21st Century Skills: Realising our Potential, launched in 2003. It proposed increased support for adults seeking to gain technical and craft qualifications where regional skills shortages existed, removing the age limit for Modern Apprentices and making information and communications technology the third essential "skill for life" alongside literacy and numeracy.
Lewis was also involved with a scheme to introduce apprenticeships for 14-year-olds alongside their schooling, commenting that Britain needed to challenge "uniquely snobbish" attitudes toward vocational education
Lewis then served as Economic Secretary to the Treasury from May 2005 to May 2006. He was moved to a position in the Department of Health in the Cabinet reshuffle in May 2006.
On 29 June 2007, in Gordon Brown's first reshuffle as Prime Minister he was re-appointed to the post of Parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Department of Health, the only junior minister to survive the reshuffle where he held on to the brief for social care and added mental health services.
Lewis described his own policy changes as "arguably the biggest redistribution of power from the state to the citizen that we have ever seen", while David Brindle of The Guardian praised him for having done a "huge amount" to raise the profile of social care.
In March 2008, Lewis warned that the Labour Party was losing touch with ordinary people under the leadership of Gordon Brown in an article written for Progress Online. Lewis stated he believed the Government had lost touch with what fairness meant to the mainstream majority. He wrote:
In his book The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour, the journalist Andrew Rawnsley suggested that Lewis was a target of "Gordon Brown's Hit Squad". In relation to the Susie Mason story, Rawnsley wrote: "Yet there were few Labour MPs who doubted that the story was planted by No. 10, which was privy to a confidential Whitehall report about the civil servant. The hit on Lewis stunned Ministers who regarded themselves as unshockable". The story was leaked twelve months after the events occurred. Senior civil servants dealing with the Mason issue advised that no action should be taken against Lewis.
Brown's former communications chief, Damian McBride, confessed in his memoir that he reprimanded Lewis, then junior health minister, in 2008 for commenting on tax policy, only to be passed the message that Lewis would not be intimidated. Angered, McBride then fed to the News of the World a story about Lewis allegedly pestering a young female civil servant in his private office. McBride expressed deep remorse in retrospect, saying he had been "a cruel, vindictive, thoughtless bastard".
He remained there until June 2009, when he was promoted to Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. Lewis was responsible for the UK's Middle East policy, the UK's relations with the US and China, counter terrorism and counter proliferation.
In September 2011, Lewis was reappointed to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for International Development. Lewis is a member of Labour Friends of Israel.
In October 2013, Lewis was moved in a Shadow Cabinet reshuffle from the International Development portfolio to the Shadow Northern Ireland one. However, despite his reshuffle, which was seen by many commentators as a demotion, he fulfilled a standing commitment to outline Labour's vision on International Development at The University of Manchester, during Manchester Policy Week. In the September 2015 Labour shadow cabinet reshuffle under the newly elected leader Jeremy Corbyn, Lewis offered to continue in the role of Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland temporarily amid the troubling political situation there. Lewis reported that Corbyn had rejected his offer and informed him by text message that he had decided to give the role to another MP.
Lewis had originally floated the concept in a chapter written for The Purple Book, a collection of essays written by mainly senior figures in the party offering new policy ideas.
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