Piers Rolf Garfield Merchant (2 January 1951 – 21 September 2009) was a British Conservative Party politician.

Merchant was educated at Nottingham High School and the University of Durham, where he studied law and politics.

[1] He was caught by The Sun romancing with a teenage nightclub hostess on a park bench in south-east London.

He later claimed that the whole affair had been set up by his one time assistant and family friend, Anthony Gilberthorpe, for a payment of £25,000 from the Sunday Mirror.

In July 2009 he was diagnosed with advanced multisite metastatic prostate cancer.