Daniel Robert Kawczynski (Polish: Kawczyński [kaˈft͡ʂɨj̃skʲi]; born 24 January 1972) is a British politician who was a Conservative Party MP.
Kawczynski has served as Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, a parliamentary aide to the former Welsh Secretary David Jones,[1] as well as serving as a member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and as Special Advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron on Central and Eastern Europe and on Central and Eastern Europeans living in the United Kingdom.
[4][8] Kawczynski unsuccessfully stood as the Conservative Party candidate in the 2001 general election for Ealing Southall in London, coming second with 18% of the vote.
[12] In 2007, Kawczynski signed an Early Day Motion that welcomed the "positive contribution made to the health of the nation by the NHS homeopathic hospitals".
[16] In October 2009, he appeared on The Doha Debates as a delegate supporting the motion of "This house deplores the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi".
[1] When Jones lost his role in 2014, Kawczynski became advisor to the Prime Minister David Cameron on Eastern and Central European Diaspora.
[34] From February 2018, he was paid £6,000 per month by the Electrum Group, a New York City-based investment, advisory and asset management firm owned by Thomas Kaplan.
[36] Labour MP Andrew Gwynne called for Kawczynski to be suspended from Parliament,[37] and he received additional criticism from some within the Conservative Party.
[40] On a visit to Saudi Arabia, he told then defence minister Salman Al Saud that he was proud of the ongoing military cooperation between the two countries.
He later said that he was writing "the most pro-Saudi book ever written by a British politician" and that he had been "battling against extraordinary ignorance and prejudice against Saudi Arabia for many years".
[40] During an appearance on Newsnight in September 2018, Kawczynski defended the Saudi regime's approach to the war in Yemen and accused the BBC of bias against the Gulf coalition.
"[41] He threatened legal action after its editor Ian Katz suggested his opinion on the issue might be linked to the size of the budget for his expenses on trips to Saudi Arabia.
[45] In 2019 the Shropshire Star reported that Kawczynski's top three priorities for his new term in office were "adult social care, modernising the county's hospitals and tackling climate change.
"[46] The newspaper also quoted Kawczynski's concern that Shropshire Council was facing "intolerable financial pressures when it came to funding care for older people" and, in his view, "the Conservative Party should use its majority to find a fair solution to the problem.
The incident occurred after Kawczynski was unable to join a virtual meeting due to "technical difficulties" and afterwards he was "rude, aggressive and impatient" to staff members and made "critical and untruthful comments" about them in a WhatsApp group.
"[48] He was ordered to make the apology by the Independent Expert Panel chaired by Sir Stephen Irwin, following receipt of a report by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner.
[55] He had been a frequent visitor to the British Polish Chamber of Commerce in Warsaw where he often spoke of the importance of trade between Poland and the United Kingdom.
In 2016, Kawczynski was distinguished as an "Outstanding Pole Abroad of 2016" for his efforts in promoting trade and political relations between the United Kingdom and his country of birth.
On 15 October 2017, he sent a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel urging her to stop demanding money from the UK during the Brexit negotiations and pay Poland.
[63][64] On 2 February 2019, Kawczynski tweeted, in the context of a complaint about certain attitudes of the European Union, that "Britain helped to liberate half of Europe.