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 in to parliament in 2001, and he was appointed to post of Shadow Minister for Homeland Security in June 2003 by the then-Leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith MP. He continues to hold this position under the new Leader, David Cameron MP.

The post of Shadow Minister for Homeland Security does not have an immediate equivalent in government. The Rt Hon Adam Ingram MP, the Minister of State for the Armed Forces who Mercer scutizes as part of his brief commentated 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.

During the war in Northern Ireland, Mercer was a member of the British Army's Force Research Unit. The FRU was a secret unit set up to liason with Loyalist terror groups in an attempt to gain an upper hand against the IRA. The operation backfired however, when it became clear that the Loyalist groups were continuing to kill mainly innocent Catholics. Mercer himself was the target of two IRA assassination attempts, after which he retired from the British Army and went into politics.

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