A HAMPSHIRE MP has launched a personal attack on a political rival who plans to stand against him at the next general election.

Julian Lewis, Tory MP for New Forest East, used Parliamentary privilege – which protects him from legal action resulting from anything he says on the floor of the House of Commons – to accuse his Liberal Democrat opponent of being a “nutter”, an “extremely unscrupulous individual”

and “a devious and two-faced bully who operates in the dark”.

Dr Lewis went on to brand his target a “malevolent failure”

who was “unfit for any elected position in public life” and who had “poisoned the politics of New Forest East”.

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The subject of the MP’s comments, Terry Scriven, said yesterday he was “horrified” by the attack, which he said was designed to stop him from asking legitimate questions about Dr Lewis’s expenses.

Dr Lewis’s diatribe, launched during a late-night Parliamentary debate, centred on the claim that Mr Scriven had sought to “compromise” the secrecy of his home address, which he has kept hidden from the public over fears for his personal safety arising from his work “against political extremists at home and abroad”.

He said Mr Scriven had put in “no fewer than 16 freedom of information requests to the House of Commons, 12 of which directly relate to me and my staff ”, and accused him of conspiring with tabloid journalists to “blacken my name”.

He added: “Knowing that he cannot defeat me politically, he has gambled everything on trying to smear me personally.”

Mr Scriven, a former colonel in the Royal Military Police who has lived in the New Forest for 13 years, told the Daily Echo: “I am horrified by the personal and cowardly attack on me by Dr Lewis who has yet again hidden behind Parliamentary protection.

“I therefore demand an apology.

There can be no doubt that it is aimed at stopping me asking further questions about him that we have the right to have answers to.”

He added: “I am not aware of smearing Dr Lewis and I am sure I have never called him any names or attacked him.

“I have only asked questions on issues of interest that people have a right to know about.”