Sir Julian Murray Lewis (born 26 September 1951) is a British Conservative Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for New Forest East since 1997.

He actively pursues the retention and renewal of the British strategic nuclear deterrent, the UK Trident programme – confirmed in 2016 – and campaigns for Defence expenditure to be restored to 3% of GDP.

Lewis had the Conservative Party whip removed after successfully standing against Boris Johnson's preferred candidate for the chairmanship of the Intelligence and Security Committee, former Secretary of State for Transport Chris Grayling, on 15 July 2020.

[16][17] Lewis stood as the Conservative candidate in Swansea West at the 1983 general election, coming second with 36.6% of the vote behind the incumbent Labour MP Alan Williams.

[22] Although Lewis was repeatedly listed as amongst the lowest-claiming MPs (ranked 566th out of 647 in 2008/09), The Sunday Telegraph alleged in May 2009 that he had tried to claim the £6,000 cost of a wooden floor in his second home.

[25] With the creation of the Liberal-Conservative Coalition as a result of the election of a hung parliament in 2010, the post which he had shadowed (Minister for the Armed Forces) was allocated to the Liberal Democrat Defence spokesman, Nick Harvey MP.

In February 2011, he strongly opposed, and was one of three Conservative MPs who voted against, Coalition plans to transfer heritage forests from public ownership to trusts.

He predicted that "Once Daesh has been driven out... an Occupying Power will have to remain in control for many years to come... and only the Syrian Government Army is likely to provide it... Airstrikes alone are a dangerous diversion and distraction.

[47] In July 2019, the Committee published an Update to Shifting the Goalposts?, which confirmed that defence expenditure had declined in successive years to 1.9% (2014–15), then 1.8% (2015–16, 2016–17 and 2017–18), when "calculated on a historically consistent basis".

The Use of Lariam by Military Personnel, published in May 2016, which led to a significant reduction in the use of the anti-malarial drug mefloquine, and to the enforcement of stringent requirements before its prescription, on account of possible severe side-effects in some cases.

North Korea and the Threat it Poses, published in April 2018, which concluded that Kim Jong-un is "ruthless, like other Communist dictators before him, but he is rational" and can be "dissuaded from the use of nuclear weapons by means of a policy of deterrence and containment" though "unlikely to give them up now".

[59] In February 2018, Julian Lewis and his French counterpart Jean-Jacques Bridey agreed to launch a joint Inquiry by their respective committees into the UK-France future cruise/anti-ship weapon project.

[2] Lewis had the Conservative Party whip removed later that day for what a government source described as "working with Labour and other opposition MPs for his own advantage"; but Lewis stated that he had never responded to government whips about how he would vote, because he considered it an "improper request" as the 2013 Justice and Security Act explicitly removed the Prime Minister's right to choose the committee chair:[3][61] "At no earlier stage did I give any undertaking to vote for any particular candidate".

[61] Although, the following day, the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, said he would not rule out a plot to remove Lewis from the ISC,[62] the government took no further action against him and restored the Conservative Party whip to him unconditionally on 30 December 2020.

[63] His essay on Nuclear Disarmament versus Peace in the 21st Century won the Trench Gascoigne Prize of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) in 2005.

[65] His 10,000-word dissertation on The Future of the British Nuclear Deterrent was selected for an award and for publication as a Seaford House Paper by the Royal College of Defence Studies of which he was a Parliamentary member in 2006.

[67] In choosing it as a 'Book of the Year 2011' for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, historian Andrew Roberts described Samuel Kinkead as "one of the bravest airmen of the 20th century", and Racing Ace as "exactly what an action biography should be".

[68] Lewis's critique of strategy in Afghanistan International Terrorism – The Case for Containment was published in the US military journal Joint Force Quarterly in April 2012.