City fan for Cockspur Street

So it won't be Caroline Flint v Jeremy Hunt in DCMS debates.  Ed Miliband has given the Shadow Culture Secretary role to Ivan Lewis MP.  Ivan voted for David in the leadership election, and didn't cast any of his other preference votes.

His principal qualification seems to be that he's a Manchester City fan. He says he has four season tickets to Eastlands, and doesn't use corporate hospitality.

He was born in March 1967 in Prestwich and educated at William Hulme Grammar School in Whalley Bridge, Manchester, (Motto Fide Sed Cui Vide  "Trust but watch whom you trust"),  Stand Sixth Form College and Bury College.  At 19, he entered "the local voluntary sector". At 23, he married Juliette Fox, 30 in one of the many local synagogues - Prestwich and its environs have the second largest Jewish population in the UK.   In the same year, 1990, he was elected to the local council for Sedgley ward.  He worked for Outreach, Contact Community Group and was latterly Chief Executive of the Manchester Jewish Federation. 

In 1997 he was elected to Parliament for Bury South.. 

In 2006, Ivan, aged 39, left Juliette, and their two sons, then aged 9 and 11, in the family home in Prestwich for an affair with a local Labour Councillor and neighbour, Margaret Gibb, 50 - who left her husband and student son.   At that stage, Ivan moved to live with his father, Joel, in Sedgley Park.  The affair apparently didn't last long.

In January 2008, Ivan's debating style as  Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health lead to Libdem Greg Mulholland calling him "an a*******", as Hansard reported it.  The Daily Mail filled in some of the blanks to help the bewildered reader: "an a***hole".


In June 2008, the News Of The World revealed that a secretary working for Ivan in the Department of Health had complained about text messages from her boss. Susie Mason had been moved to other work, then left for a job with City accountants.  The timing of the revelation was odd - the texting seems to have happened in 2006/7, and the News of The World got its story as Lewis was openly calling for stronger leadership from Gordon Brown, and said Labour should be franker about taxing the rich.   Nick Cohen cites the appearance of the story as one of the reasons he began to despise Gordon Brown.


In costs and allowances last year, Ivan claimed £173,382, placing him at 51st in the league table of all MPs. At the Guardian, Andrew Roth profiled him as  a "youthful Blairite showing glutinous fealty as displayed by robotic loyalist interjections".