Chris Bowers

So who is Chris Bowers?

Given that I’d like you to put your trust in me to represent Wealden, it’s only fair that I tell you a little about myself.

For the past 18 years I’ve made my living primarily out of reporting and commentating on tennis, and in 2006 I wrote the first international biography of the Wimbledon champion, Roger Federer.  But no backhanded compliments please – there’s a little more to me than just fluffy yellow balls.

I’m 49, I’m a councillor on Lewes District Council, and live pretty much on the border between Lewes and Wealden with my partner and eight-year-old daughter.  I trained as a newspaper journalist, and then moved into radio and television.  I spent two years with the Swiss world service in Bern, before coming back to spend 18 months with BBC Radio in London.  That stint ended when I became the founder director of the Environmental Transport Association, and subsequently the coordinator of the European Federation for Transport and Environment.  That was fine for a while, but I became alarmed about how much of my job was paper-pushing, so in 1992 I threw it all in to become a freelance writer and broadcaster specialising in tennis, while still doing a fair bit of work for the European Federation for Transport and Environment.

I can’t claim to be from East Sussex, but I’m a bit more than your average London escapee.  If I leave off a school trip at 14 that involved a dawn crossing from Newhaven, I first came to this part of the world in 1984 when a good friend and Sussex lass brought me home.  Having been born and raised in the north-west of England, I was struggling to find anywhere that had the potential to feel like home the way my beloved Wirral did.  In 1984, I found it, with an affinity for this part of the world that I can’t describe but is just there.

It took me another 14 years to settle here, when my partner and I set up home in Ringmer in August 1998.  Three years earlier I had met Norman Baker on an Indian Ocean island (not quite as bizarre or environmentally dubious as it sounds), and acted as his aide in the 1997 general election campaign.  Three weeks scuttling to and fro across the district was a fabulous introduction to the beauty and wonders of this stretch of the South Downs, and I was hooked.

I speak German and French fluently, and can just about get by in Spanish with the help of some frantic arm gestures.  I’m blessed with perfect pitch, which has helped me to Grade 5 on the piano and Grade 8 on the violin, two passions I sadly have very little time for these days, but I do find time for a couple of sets of tennis each week.

You won’t see me photographed for my political work with my family, because my wife doesn’t want to be involved in politics, and we both believe it’s wrong to use one’s children for political purposes.  I ask others to respect that too.