Adam has been the Member of Parliament for Gravesham since he was elected in 2005, with a majority of 654. In 2019, he was re-elected with a majority of 15,581.
He was previously a soldier, and later an investigative journalist for ITV and ITN. These experiences have influenced much of his political working life, in which he regularly speaks about street homelessness, immigration, the armed forces and the Middle East.
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Adam was born in Faversham and educated in Kent, Surrey and at Cambridge University where he read Theology and then Social and Political Science. Later, he did an MBA at Imperial College London’s Business School.
He spent his “gap year” in Afghanistan with the Afghan Resistance, who were fighting the Russians at the time, and his University holidays were spent visiting and working in Pakistan, Soweto and Nicaragua.
After University, Adam attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards. He served in the army for five years, as an armoured infantry platoon commander in Cold War West Germany and as a Captain in Iraq during the First Gulf War. He was also an instructor for trainee guardsmen.
After leaving the army, he became a television reporter for ITV and ITN. His record prime-time audience documentaries include No Fixed Abode for World in Action, in which he lived on the streets of London for three months, examining the plight of the capital’s homeless population.
In documentaries for his prime-time ITV series, Disguises, Adam joined the victims of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and posed as a homeless schizophrenic on the streets of London and Birmingham.
During Adam’s time as a reporter for ITN, he worked Bosnia correspondent - including a long stint in Sarajevo during the dark days of the siege - and ran the investigative unit on News at Ten, which included him posing as a paedophile sex tourist in the Philippines to expose child prostitution.
Adam posed as an economic migrant living in the Sangatte refugee camp in Calais and in 2003, he returned to Iraq as a war journalist, working alongside the remarkable Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times, who was killed in Syria in 2012.
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Adam was elected to serve as the MP for Gravesham in May 2005. He was re-elected in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019.
Since March 2020, Adam serves as a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee.
He previously served as a Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury), which he was appointed in September 2022. In 2006, he was appointed to the Defence Select Committee, which he served on until September 2010 and again from November 2012 to November 2014.
He served on the Foreign Affairs Committee from July 2015 to May 2017.
In 2010, Adam joined the Government as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Europe, but resigned from the job in October 2011, when he was asked to vote against a non-binding Backbench Motion offering the British people a Referendum on Europe.
A vote for the motion would have gone against all he’d been saying to his constituents as a Eurosceptic; a decision for which he was awarded ‘Backbencher of the Year’ in The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards in 2011 as an MP who “in a choice between career and principle, chose principle.”
Adam actively campaigned for Leave during the EU Referendum. He was one of the Tory rebels who voted to keep no-deal on the table and was one of the very first to write a letter of no-confidence in Theresa May’s leadership during her Brexit negotiations.
He was also one of the 28 so-called ‘Brexit Spartans’ who voted against Theresa May’s deal when it was presented for a third time.
During his time in Parliament, Adam has taken a close interest in the war in Afghanistan and visited, under his own arrangements and at his own expense, about a dozen times.
In the course of the collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, he was in Benghazi during the fighting, and in Tripoli in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the city.
He also spent time in Iraq at the frontline with the Islamic State, and on his own visited Mosul at the height of the demise of Islamic State.
He was co-chairman of the Council for Arab British Understanding and Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Middle East Council. Previously, he’d been on the board of Christian Aid.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Adam set up ‘Gravesham Community Support’: a major initiative encouraging people to become ‘Super Neighbours,’ in order to pool resources, and to support and help their neighbours.