Born in Faversham and educated in Kent and Surrey, Adam read Theology (BA) followed by Social and Political Science (MA) at Cambridge University.

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Aged 18, he spent his “gap-year” in Afghanistan with the Resistance against the Russians. During university holidays he returned to Afghanistan and Pakistan, worked as a teacher in Soweto, South Africa, and visited Nicaragua.

At the end of his University career, Adam was accepted into the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and was subsequently commissioned into the Grenadier Guards. He served as an armoured infantry platoon commander in Cold War Germany and as a Captain in Iraq during the First Gulf War. He was also an instructor for trainee guardsmen.

After serving for four years, he went on to become a television reporter. His well-known documentaries included the “No Fixed Abode” series on World in Action, where he lived homeless on the streets of London for three months. This program gained record prime time audiences. ITV then gave Adam his own series of undercover documentaries that saw him in a wide range of situations; joining the victims of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, living as a homeless psychiatric patient and as a disabled person in a wheelchair. Later he worked at ITN; first as a general reporter, then as a correspondent in Sarajevo during the siege. Finally he ran the investigative unit on News at Ten, which included him posing as a paedophile sex tourist in the Philippines to uncover child prostitution.

In 2003, Adam returned to Iraq as a war journalist (with Marie Colvin, the remarkable Sunday Times journalist who was sadly killed in Syria in 2012), and posed as an economic migrant at the Sangatte refugee camp in Calais.

Adam was elected to serve as the MP for Gravesham in May 2005 with a majority of 654 and re-elected in 2010 with a majority of 9,312. In 2006, he was appointed to the Defence Select Committee, which he left in September 2010 to join the Government as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Europe. Adam resigned from that post in October 2011 when he was asked to vote against a non-binding Backbench Motion offering the British people a Referendum on Europe. Adam again served on the Defence Select Committee from November 2012 to November 2014. He is currently a member of the Public Administration Select Committee. During his time in Parliament he has taken a close interest in the war in Afghanistan and has visited outside the military envelope, at his own expense and that of a number of kind donors, about a dozen times. He was also in Benghazi during the fighting, and in Tripoli in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the city. Most recently he has been to the frontline of the Islamic State in northern Iraq.

Adam has been described as "continuing to buck trends as a constituency MP”. He was co-Chairman of the Council for Arab British Understanding, and is Vice- Chairman of the Conservative Middle East Council.