Lymington Times – 28 November 2009

If you enter the phrase ‘TERRY SCRIVEN – THE FULL STORY’ into the Google search engine, a link appears to my website. Clicking on that takes you to a speech I made on 28 April about this man’s malicious campaign of smears, innuendo and hostile action against me and some of my staff. Anyone tempted to take his latest letter (“A&T” November 21st) seriously, really should read that speech, or watch the video of me making it, in order to understand what he has been trying to do.

As previously reported without the protection of Parliamentary Privilege, his behaviour has included:

• Publicly claiming to support my campaign to protect MPs’ home addresses, whilst privately working with the journalist campaigning to reveal them;
• Demanding that I be criminally investigated by Hampshire Police for the way I registered to vote, even though this had been approved by the Electoral Registration Officer – this attempt was condemned by the Chief Constable of Hampshire as being “a total waste of effort and not in the public interest” (Lymington Times, 16 August 2008);
• Writing to the heads of MI5 and MI6, behind my back, demanding to know if I have ever worked for these secret agencies; and
• Initiating a story in the News of the World which falsely claimed that I “hardly visit” my home in the constituency, when I have lived there continuously for over a decade.

Terry Scriven had every opportunity to deny these charges after they were published in your edition of June 6th. He did not do so. Subsequently, as you will recall, the Press Complaints Commission forced the News of the World to withdraw its malicious story and apologise.

Mr Scriven knows perfectly well that my mortgage arrangements have been checked and cleared over and over again. If there were anything wrong with them, he would have been the first person to report me to the House of Commons authorities. As for the future, I have welcomed the Kelly Report which specifically recommends a transition time of one more Parliament before mortgage interest repayments cease. (MPs, of course, have always had to repay the mortgage capital themselves.) There is absolutely nothing wrong with this recommendation by Sir Christopher Kelly, and I intend to accept and follow it.

As I stated in the House of Commons, people who knew Mr Scriven many years ago, before he retired as a Military Policeman, warned me from the outset that I would attacked personally rather than politically. Indeed, while I have been campaigning to save our mental health units, to keep our community hospitals, to counter the renewed threat to Dibden Bay, and to curb the excesses of the National Park Authority, Terry Scriven’s activities have been very different.

Apart from giving full backing to the NPA when it was running amok under its previous management, he has spent his time trying to smear me in the press and distributing a Lib-Dem propaganda sheet, called ‘The Forest’, which is dressed up to look like a genuine newspaper. Forest and Waterside people do not like such attempts to manipulate them – and I trust that this will be seen, once again, when the votes are counted at the next General Election.

(Dr) JULIAN LEWIS MP
House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA