Bob Marshall-Andrews QC

Barrister and occasional novelist, former Labour MP for Medway

Born in April 1944,  Bob Marshall-Andrews was called to the Bar in 1970, and became a Crown Court Recorder in 1982, a Queen's Counsel in 1987 and a Bencher at Gray’s Inn in 1996. He specialised in commercial fraud.

He entered Parliament in 1997 and retired in April 2010. He was a member of the Parliamentary Humanist Group and a frequent rebel against his own party. According to ‘dodonline’ his political interests are Economic Policy, Environment, Civil Liberties and Parliamentary Democracy, and his countries of interest are East Africa and the USA . He is a Founder and Trustee of the George Adamson Wildlife Trust which is presently running the Mkomazi Game Reserve in Tanzania and a Trustee and Chair of the Development Committee for the Geffrye Museum in London.

In 2011, when no longer an MP, he published an irreverent autobiography, Off Message, "a subversive and richly comical account of British political life during New Labour's term in office [and] an intimate picture of what it was like to be its most prominent dissident member". Buy it at Amazon.co.uk through this link and a small commission will go to Humanists UK.

Read what else Bob Marshall-Andrews has written:
“A Threat to Liberty”
“The right to trial by jury is indispensable”
“Identity Cards Bill”
The Palace of Wisdom, his novel about the war between science and religion, set in the 17th century (Hamish Hamilton and Penguin 1989). See review by Cecelia Holland here and buy it here.
A Man Without Guilt, a crime novel (Methuen 2002 - read about it here and buy it here.

See also
A brief Wikipedia biography
A brief BBC profile
Profile by Paul Flynn MP
TheyWorkForYou.com for more details on his parliamentary career
"Irreverent visit to Medway" by Simon Hoggart, The Guardian, 11 th April 2005