Sir Julian Michael Gordon Critchley (8 December 1930 – 9 September 2000) was a British journalist, author and Conservative Party politician.
After a year living and studying at the Sorbonne in Paris he went up in 1951 to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
In 1953 he was part of a team of Oxford undergraduates lobbying Vickers shipyard workers against nationalisation; the others were Michael Heseltine, Guy Arnold and Martin Morton.
Having lost Rochester and Chatham in 1964, he stood again for the seat in the 1966 election, but was once again defeated by the Labour candidate Anne Kerr.
[1] Critchley was considered to be on the left wing of the Conservative Party (one of the "wets" in Thatcherite terminology) and never attained ministerial rank.
In 1980 he sparked controversy by writing an anonymous article in The Observer signed "by a Tory", in which he criticised Thatcher's "A level economics" and called her "didactic, tart and obstinate".
Having separated from his second wife, he lived with Prue Bellak, with whom he had previously been in a relationship many years earlier, at the Sorbonne; they reunited by chance towards the end of his time as an MP.