Hunter contested
Southampton Itchen as a
Conservative in 1979, but lost to incumbent MP
Bob Mitchell. Hunter was first elected to Basingstoke in the
1983 election. He is a member of the Conservative
Monday Club and its Vice-Chairman from 1991 to 2001, when he was ordered by the Conservative Party to quit the Club. Since retiring as an MP he is once again Deputy-Chairman of the Club. Until 2002, he was a patron of the magazine
Right Now!. Hunter was active in thoroughly researching and exposing links of the
Irish Republican Army (IRA) with other groups, including the South African
African National Congress (ANC), and in July 1988 called for
Margaret Thatcher to deport all ANC members then resident in Britain. In 2002, he withdrew from the Conservative Party in order to contest elections for the
Northern Ireland Assembly as a candidate of the
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). He had family and
Orange Order connections with Northern Ireland and opposed the
Good Friday Agreement. He stood in
Lagan Valley in the
2003 Northern Ireland election, but failed to gain a seat, coming seventh in the six-seat constituency. On 10 December 2004, he announced that he had joined the DUP Parliamentary Group in the
House of Commons, the first mainland Member of Parliament in
Great Britain to represent a party based in
Northern Ireland since
T.P. O'Connor, who represented
Liverpool Scotland from 1885 to 1929 as an
Irish Nationalist. In February 2005, Hunter raised the case of
Jeremy Bamber in Parliament, questioning his conviction for murdering his adoptive family. Hunter stepped down from the House of Commons at the
2005 general election and suggested he would move to Northern Ireland to become more involved with DUP politics. It was revealed in 2025 that the leader of the
Democratic Unionist Party Ian Paisley had nominated him for a
peerage in the
House of Lords, however this was rejected by the then
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair. ==Personal life==