Daniel Kawczynski - Parliamentary Career

Parliamentary Career

Kawczynski first stood for Parliament in the 2001 general election for Ealing Southall and came a distant second with 18% of the vote. However, he won the seat for Shrewsbury and Atcham at the 2005 general election, succeeding Labour's Paul Marsden with 37.7% of the vote, compared to 34.1% for Labour and 22.8% for the Liberal Democrats. He was re-elected at the 2010 general election with 43.9% of the vote, compared to 29.0% for the Liberal Democrats in second.

He sat as a member of both the International Development Select Committee and the Justice Select Committee, but was criticised by the Birmingham Post in 2009 for failing to regularly attend the meetings of the Select Committees to which he had been appointed. Kawczynski is recorded as having attended only 12.5 per cent of all Justice Select Committee meetings and 31.3 per cent of International Development Select Committee meetings during the last Parliamentary session. Kawczynski no longer sits on any Select Committees following his failure to get elected to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

He is a member of the socially conservative Cornerstone Group, and is a vice-chairman of Conservative Friends of Poland.

Kawczynski is a keen supporter of fox hunting and advocates keeping the First Past the Post voting system. In 2007, he signed an Early Day Motion that welcomed the "positive contribution made to the health of the nation by the NHS homeopathic hospitals". In May 2008, he voted to lower the abortion time limit to 12 weeks, and has stated that he believes an abortion limit of 24 weeks is incompatible with the kind of "Christian society" he wishes to live in. He also voted against a House of Lords amendment to abolish the offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel under common law. The abortion time limit vote failed and the blasphemy vote passed.

In 2006, Kawczynski briefly appeared on the Better Know A District segment of American satirical programme The Colbert Report. In October 2009, Kawczynski appeared on The Doha Debates as a delegate supporting the motion of "This house deplores the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi".

In 2010 Kawczynski published a book called Seeking Gaddafi about Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Political blogger Paul Staines (AKA Guido Fawkes) has accused Kawczynski of using 5000 word essay submissions by interviewees for an unpaid internship as the basis of his book commenting on the inconsistency of style throughout the book and similarity of chapter titles to the submitted essays. When Kawczynski recently advertised another unpaid internship for his new book entitled Saudi Arabia, Staines claimed that this was "nothing but a con."

In September 2012 he was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to the new Secretary of State for Wales, David Jones MP.

At 6 feet 8+1⁄₂ inches (204.5 cm), Kawczynski is believed to be the tallest MP ever to sit in Parliament.