The consumer champion applied for a peerage but says he couldn't commit enough time to politics.
Consumer champion Martin Lewis has revealed that he applied recently to become a member of the House of Lords but was turned down.
In a wide-ranging interview for the Political Thinking with Nick Robinson podcast, Mr Lewis also spoke of how his nickname at the school - at which there were only two Jewish boys in his year - had been "Jew". "I was a pretty decent political speaker," he said, adding that he had been a member of the Liberal Democrats until the age of 24 and a "floating voter" since then.
Mr Lewis said that this had proved to be "a stumbling block, although [the committee] have invited me to apply again in future". "It's a very competitive process. We make very few appointments and consequently we have to turn down some very good candidates."Mr Lewis described the adversarial, party-based system of Westminster politics, and that in operation in other western democracies, as "destructive, horrendous".