Sir Stuart Bell is the Member of Parliament for Middlesbrough, a Barrister-at-Law and an author of published works.

In his capacity as Member of Parliament, he is a member of Her Majesty’s Government and also of Her Majesty’s household, bearing the title of Second Church Estates Commissioner. He has held this post since 1997 and is responsible in Parliament for church-state relationships with a Question Time where he responds to questions from other MPs on church matters. He is also a member of the Speaker’s Commission that runs the House of Commons Parliamentary estate and is Chairman of the Finance & Services Committee. As a Select Committee chairman, he is also a member of the Liaison Committee of the House of Commons.                                                        Sir Stuart born in High Spen, County Durham

He has been a member of the Labour Party since 1964, contested Hexham for Labour in 1979, became a Newcastle City Councillor in 1981 and Member of Parliament for Middlesbrough in 1983. As City councillor, he was a member of the Health and Environment Committee and the Arts and Recreation Committee and Finance Committee; he was vice chair of the Education Committee and chair of the Youth and Community Committee. He also sat on the Council of Local Education Authorities and was a member of the Newcastle Health Authority (Teaching).

On becoming Member of Parliament, he became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Roy Hattersley MP, and in 1984 became front bench spokesperson for Northern Ireland, a post he held until the 1987 General Election. He resigned from the front bench to handle the Cleveland child abuse crisis, where 119 children were taken from their homes by social workers on allegations of child abuse; their cases would last four and a half years, through court hearings, the longest public enquiry known at the time – 117 days – called the Butler-Sloss enquiry, the passage through Parliament of a new Children Act, and damages to the families which, with legal costs added, came to £1 million.

Sir Stuart rejoined the Labour front bench after the 1992 General Election when John Smith became leader. He would serve under both John Smith and Tony Blair as shadow spokesperson for trade and industry, a post he would hold for five years until the 1997 Election.

He was then appointed by the Queen on the recommendation of the Prime Minister to be her Second Church Estates Commissioner and was reconfirmed in this post after the 200l General Election.

He was appointed to the House of Commons Commission in 1999 and also became Chairman of the Finance and Services Committee and the Liaison Committee the same year.

He was born in May 1938, the son of Ernest and Margaret Rose Bell; he was born and raised in the North-West Durham mining village of High Spen – that he would call Highhill in his novels - and after primary school passed the 11-plus for Hookergate Grammar School. He left at the age of sixteen with five O-levels and began working in Chopwell Colliery office. Born of mining stock, his father would spend fifty-one years in the pit, apart from a period in the First World War; his brother Roy also worked in the pit before leaving to take work in Newcastle-upon Tyne.

His mother looked after hearth and home. His sister Heather worked in a bookmaker’s office in Newcastle. After nine months in the colliery office, Stuart joined the local Blaydon Courier and aged eighteen came to London to work briefly as copytaker for the Daily Telegraph and later as typist and shorthand-typist in the City of London where he worked four years for an employment agency. He wrote free-lance newspaper articles for Weekend Mail and Reveille.

He also worked as a typist a Lloyd’s of London and when an international lawyer he became a name at Lloyd’s, resigning in 1986.

Resolved to be a writer, first a newspaper reporter and then an author, he enrolled at Pitman’s College in Southampton Road, London, and over eighteen months built up a shorthand speed of 150-words a minute before leaving to live in Paris. He had wanted to be a Hansard shorthand writer but would reach the House of Commons by another route some twenty-three years later. In London and Paris he wrote his first book of short stories and four novels.

Unable to make money as an author, Sir Stuart worked for an American attorney first as secretary and then as collaborator, reading for the Bar in his spare time. He joined Gray’s Inn and was called to the Bar in 1970. He practiced private international law as conseil juridique from offices in the Avenue des Champs Elysees and Avenue Montaigne and wrote a published treatise entitled Valuation for United States Customs Purposes. He returned to England in 1977 to take up a full-time career in politics. Using the rules of the then Common Market, he was able to plead a case before a jury in the Palais de Justice and upon his nomination as Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Middlesbrough would practice on the Northern Circuit with chambers in Middlesbrough. When still in Paris, he would follow the French Presidential Elections in 1974 and write a further book, Giscard’s Fifth Republic, which was not published. He would set aside his legal practice on becoming Member of Parliament for Middlesbrough in 1983.

Upon entering politics, he would continue his writing with a Fabian tract entitled How to Abolish the Lords, published in 1981; he was Chairman of the First Past the Post Group in the Labour Party and wrote a pamphlet opposing proportional representation entitled Raising the Standard, published in 1988. Recently he has written a booklet entitled Pathway to the Euro, which he described as ‘a factual guide and therefore a reference work’ to the government’s approach to the euro. He published an account of the Cleveland Child Abuse Crisis in book form under the title When Salem Came to the Boro and also wrote an annotated version of the Children Act 1989. He has also published a collection of autobiographical short stories recounting his life in Paris as a writer and his latter-day life as a politician with such noted figures as John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson.

In the autumn of 2002, he will publish a novel entitled Binkie’s Revolution, based around the 1926 General Strike and drawing upon his life in a pit village. This will be followed next year with The Honoured Society, the second novel in a trilogy that leads from the General Strike to the creation of the United States of Europe. He will also publish the second volume of autobiographical short stories under the heading Softly in the Dusk.

The covers of published books are available for viewing on the published books page.

Sir Stuart has been a member of the General Municipal and Boilermakers’ Union since 1978; he has been a sponsored Member of Parliament until such time as sponsorship fell into desuetude. He is a member of the Fabian Society and has been a member of the Society of Labour Lawyers, a member of Labour Friends of Israel and also chairman of the All-Party Saudi Group and All-Party Jordanian Group in the House of Commons. He has been Vice-Chairman of the Inter Parliamentary Union, founder member and Vice Chairman of the British Irish Inter Parliamentary Group.

He has served on the Criminal Evidence Bill Committee, a Finance Bill Committee, a Steel Bill Committee, and the Committee dealing with the Children Act 1989. He also served on the Committee dealing with the Cardiff Bay Barrage Bill.

He has also been chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s Home Affairs Committee 1983-84 and also joint vice chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s Treasury and Civil Service Committee 1990-92. He is the only Labour MP who is a member of the Beefsteak Club and a member of its Committee.

In the New Year's Honours List for 2003, Stuart Bell was made a Knight Bachelor and was formerly knighted in the summer of 2004 by HRH The Price of Wales. 

In more recent years Sir Stuart has been actively involved in affairs across the channel in France where he has chaired a number of inter-government conferences on such diverse subjects as international trade, commerce and Franco-British co-operation.  Sir Stuart sits on the supervisory board of an influential French political think tank, the Foundation for Innovative Political Thinking since 2004.

Since June 2005, he is the Chairman of the Franco British Parliamentary Relation Committee, whose aim is to foster relations between The United Kingdom and France and especially between both houses of Parliament and Assemblee Nationale and Senate in Paris.