Jeremy Wright has been a Conservative MP since 2005, for Rugby and Kenilworth and then Kenilworth and Southam, and spent four years as Attorney General and a year running culture, media and sport. He is one of the more serious and least political figures of his generation, which is both why he was useful and why he was never powerful.

He came to the law properly, a criminal barrister who prosecuted and defended in the West Midlands before Parliament, and as a law officer he was diligent and uncontroversial in a way the role rewards. As Attorney General from 2014 to 2018 he expanded the scheme that lets the public challenge unduly lenient sentences, a small but real improvement in access to justice. His one genuinely consequential act came at culture, where in 2019 he launched the Online Harms White Paper, the document that first proposed a statutory duty of care on internet platforms enforced by a regulator, and which became the foundation of the Online Safety Act. He calls it his proudest achievement, and he is entitled to. It mattered.

The weaknesses are of weight rather than conduct. His appointment as Attorney General in 2014 was widely mocked because he was barely known in the senior legal world and had not been a Queen's Counsel, made one only for the job, and one barrister called him arguably the least distinguished attorney general in two hundred years. He defended the government's doomed argument in the first Brexit court case, that ministers could trigger Article 50 without Parliament, and lost in both the High Court and the Supreme Court. Boris Johnson sacked him from the cabinet in 2019 and he has been a backbencher ever since, his talents channelled into the Intelligence and Security Committee, of which he is now deputy chairman, rather than into the front rank of politics.

In 2024 he held Kenilworth and Southam with a majority of 6,574, Labour in second, and he was knighted in 2022.

Wright is decent, capable and the author of one piece of work, the online harms framework, that will outlast almost anything his more famous colleagues produced. He is also a reminder that competence without a political base goes only so far, a law officer respected across the House who never commanded it, and who left government before the idea he is proudest of reached the statute book. The seriousness is real and rarer than it should be. The influence never matched it.