Patrick Mercer

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Patrick John Mercer OBE (born 26 June 1956) is a politician in the United Kingdom. He is Conservative Party Member of Parliament for Newark.

He was first elected to parliament at the 2001 general election, defeating the Labour incumbent, Fiona Jones, who had been embroiled in an electoral controversy when she was first elected in 1997. Mercer was appointed to post of Shadow Minister for Homeland Security in June 2003 by the then-Leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith. He continues to hold this position under the new Leader, David Cameron.

The post of Shadow Minister for Homeland Security does not have an immediate equivalent in government. The Rt Hon Adam Ingram, the Minister of State for the Armed Forces whom Mercer scutinzes as part of his brief commented in September 2003 "I note that he calls himself a Shadow Minister, but he is more of a ghost Minister, because he does not have a department to shadow."

In 2004 he attempted to introduce a Private Members Bill in response to the publicity surrounding the case of Tony Martin that proposed to give householders greater powers when protecting their property from burglary. This Bill failed to become law as his party did not support it.

Prior to becoming a politician he served as an officer in the British Army, in the Sherwood Foresters regiment. Among other locations he was sent to Northern Ireland and Bosnia and in 1997 received the OBE for services to Bosnia. He left the army in 1999 and worked as a journalist for BBC Radio 4.

Mercer himself was the target of two IRA assassination attempts, which are detailed in the books "Dirty War" and "Trigger Men", both by Martin Dillon.