David Davis has sat in the Commons since 1987, for Boothferry, then Haltemprice and Howden, and since 2024 for Goole and Pocklington. He has built a reputation as a man of principle. The principle is real. The record in office is not.

Davis is a civil libertarian, which is rare on any bench and rarer on the Conservative one. As Shadow Home Secretary he fought the Blair and Brown surveillance laws when his own party was inclined to wave them through. In 2008 he resigned his seat and forced a by election against the proposed extension of detention without charge to 42 days, against identity cards and against mass data retention. Most MPs will not risk their standing on a point of principle. Davis resigned his seat to make one. In 2014 he took the government to court with Labour''s Tom Watson over the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act. He has refused to back leaving the European Court of Human Rights despite campaigning to leave the EU. On the citizen against the state he has been consistent for thirty years and has paid for it.

His background reinforces this. Science degree, MBA, seventeen years as an executive at Tate and Lyle. He built a career before politics, which is more than most of his front bench can claim.

For all the talk of principle, Davis has almost nothing to show for high office. His one senior post in nearly forty years was Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union from 2016, and it failed. He was the public face of the negotiation and was steadily cut out of it. By late 2017 the substance had moved to the official Olly Robbins and Downing Street. Davis was a figurehead approving other people''s work. He resigned in July 2018 over Theresa May''s Chequers plan, the strategy he had been responsible minister for over two years. He could not shape the defining negotiation of his career while holding the job created to run it.

The freedom brand is narrower than it sounds. The defender of liberty has repeatedly voted to restrict abortion, fertility treatment and embryo research and opposed same sex marriage. His liberalism guards the citizen against the state and stops at reproductive choice. That is not classical liberalism. That is selective liberalism.

He led the first round of the 2005 leadership contest and then lost it to David Cameron, who could not finish. Since then he has been a backbench campaigner, lately on miscarriages of justice, including his 2025 claim that the conviction of Lucy Letby is unsafe. It is honourable work. It is also the work of a man with no power to do anything but talk and raise questions.

Davis is at his best as a check on power and ineffective when handed it. His causes tend to be vindicated without him. The 42 day extension he opposed was defeated in the House of Lords in October 2008, not by his by election, and the 28 day limit already in law stayed in place. His court challenge with Tom Watson won a ruling that DRIPA''s data retention was unlawful, but he withdrew from it on joining the government in 2016. His principle has real value as dissent. Little of it is change he can claim as his own.

In 2024 he held the new seat of Goole and Pocklington with a majority of just 3,572 over Labour, a slim result for a figure of his supposed standing. He remains a recognisable voice on civil liberties and miscarriages of justice. It does not change the broader record: principle without achievement, consistency without consequences, moral authority bought by irrelevance.